Christopher Jermaine, professor of computer science, has been named interim chair of his department at Rice, effective Jan 1.

Jermaine succeeds Luay Nakhleh, who will become the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of the university’s George R. Brown School of Engineering on that date. Jermaine is program director of Rice’s Data Science Initiative.

He earned a B.A. in mathematics from the University of California at San Diego in 1994, an M.S. in computer science from Ohio State University in 1997 and a Ph.D. in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2002. He joined the Rice faculty in 2009 after teaching computer science for six years at the University of Florida at Gainesville.

His research focuses on data analytics with an emphasis on analyzing, storing, retrieving and manipulating large and heterogeneous data sets. Among his interests are systems-oriented problems that arise when building software to manage large and diverse data sets, and the difficulties resulting from applying statistical methods to such data sets.

Jermaine is the recipient of a 2008 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, and the George R. Brown School's Teaching and Research Excellence Award. He has received best paper/best paper runner-up awards from top journals/conferences in data mining and data management, including IEEE ICDE, ACM SIGMOD, ACM SIGKDD, and VLDB.

He serves as editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Database Systems, the Association for Computing Machinery’s flagship journal for data management research.

Author: PATRICK KURP