Four full-time faculty from the School of Science applied for and received promotion this year. Mathematics professor Torrey Gallagher was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. Azzam Elayan (Chemistry and Physics) and Emanuel Palsu-Andriescu (Mathematics) were each promoted to Senior Lecturer and Jeff Weisburg was promoted to Senior Specialist Professor. All four are well-deserved promotions recognizing their impact on the school and the students.
On May 15 we celebrated the graduation of ninety-four undergraduates and thirteen masters students. Biology led with forty-two, Chemistry with twenty-nine, Mathematics with ten and Computer Science and Software Engineering graduated twenty-nine and five, respectively. Four students earned M.S. degrees in C.S. and three in S.E. We also graduated three students with Data Science M.S. degrees. We wish our graduates all the best in beginning their journey after Monmouth. Congratulations to all! A selection of photos of the ceremony is given below.
The newly implemented Monmouth University Distinguished Scholar award celebrates and encourages sustained excellence in scholarship and research. This year, three university faculty were named as co-recipients who are each exemplary in their scholarship achievements.
Dr. Jay Wang, Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering – Dr. Wang’s scholarly interests include artificial intelligence, software engineering, formal methods, discrete event systems, and service computing. In particular, Dr. Wang’s outstanding contributions to the field of artificial intelligence (AI) research has played a pivotal role in advancing AI applications to address real-world challenges, particularly in healthcare and emergency management. His success in grant writing, and securing multiple IEEE grants for his AI research, are commendable.
Dr. Keith Dunton, Associate Professor in the Department of Biology – Dr. Dunton is a marine fisheries ecologist with over 15 years experience leading large acoustic telemetry projects focused on endangered Atlantic sturgeon and prohibited sharks to evaluate movements, migrations, and effects from anthropogenic factors. He is currently working on using eDNA as a tool to evaluate biodiversity of offshore fish communities. In the last five years, Dr. Dunton has received several monetary awards from diverse funding sources (federal, state, NGO) totaling over 8 million dollars, with additional grants under review.
Both Dr. Wang and Dr. Dunton successfully included students in their work, often leading to joint presentations and publications.
Dr. Hettie Williams, Associate Professor in History and Anthropology, in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, was the third recipient.
The 23rd Annual School of Science Student Research Conference was held on Friday, April 18th. This event showcased 32 research projects by teams of students and their faculty mentors from across the School of Science. The conference highlights the results of applied research, independent studies, and thesis projects being conducted by students in the departments of Biology, Chemistry and Physics, Computer Science and Software Engineering, and Mathematics. The conference serves as one of our many commitments to providing experiences that extend beyond the traditional classroom. KerryAnn Kelly (Software Engineering BS 2018 and MS 2019) delivered the keynote address to kick off the day.
The abstract book can be found on the SRC page.
This February, several Computer Science students, accompanied by CSSE Department Chair, Professor Ling Zheng, attended the WECode Conference in Cambridge Massachusetts. WECode (Women Engineers Code) is an annual event organized by undergraduate women at Harvard University. This conference, an initiative of Harvard Women in CS (harvardwics.com), is the largest student-run Women in Computer Science conference in the United States. WECode’s goal is to cultivate the next generation of technical leaders, foster a network and community among collegiate engineers, and promote more female representation in the technical industry.
Two Undergraduates: Mar Elbanna and Estania Blanc-Doblas and Graduate student, Gnanika Yalamanchili, from Monmouth’s Computer Science program were given the opportunity to apply and attend this 2-day event where students, speakers, and industry professionals gathered to support women thrive in the technology industries.
“I had the chance to meet knowledgeable mentors who were eager to guide and support those with a genuine interest in learning. I also connected with fellow students, Harvard attendees, and industry professionals, which reinforced how important networking is for growth and future opportunities.” Gnanika Yalamanchili, MU CS Graduate Student
Mar Elbanna, a senior CS student explained, “The speakers invited were down-to-earth and very willing to share their experience and struggles in the industry. I learned a lot about the interview process and the state of the current job market for computer science and software engineering fields. As attendees were able to interact with the speakers through questions, many fears regarding AI and similar topics were addressed.”
The Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering held their annual High School Hawk Hack on Friday, Feb. 7. Fifty students from ten New Jersey high schools participated. The event is run by the student-led club of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers/ Association for Computing Machinery, (IEEE/ACM) and Professor Rolf Kamp, who is the club advisor. Please see the following Outlook article (written by Gillian DeStefano) for a detailed account of the event.
The Department of Mathematics celebrated Pi Day early this year on Tuesday, March 13. It also happened to be International Women in Mathematics Day. It was very fitting that the two speakers represented the next generation of women in mathematics. Miriam Abecasis (Monmouth University) and Willow Denker (Binghamton University) shared the results of their ongoing research with Professor Gallagher. Following the talks, students and faculty had pies and participated in raffles in the Math Learning Center.
Monmouth MEBP major Diedrik Boonman and Faculty member Jason Adolf are part of a team that recently published an article highlighting the initial 2021 discovery and subsequent examination in 2023 of a non-native sea anemone species. This marks the first record of the sea anemone Antinia Equina found on the Mid-Atlantic Coast of the United States. These animals were found in multiple sites on man-made rocky structures of the beaches of Monmouth County, New Jersey, on the Mid-Atlantic Coast of the United States. Student Dietrik Boonman is the first author on the article. The image below shows the anemone with tentacles extended (a-e) and tentacles contracted (f-j). More details can be found in the article published in the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom found here.
CSSE students Omar Ahmed and Andrew Catapano recently received the 2024 Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE) Scholarship Award. Omar is a senior Computer Science student actively involved on campus, serving as a Peer Mentor for the School of Science, a Mathematics Tutor, and a PAL for Chemistry and Biology courses. Andrew is a graduate computer science student who, as an undergraduate, won the Academic Excellence Award from the CSSE department last year and serves as the Vice President of the eSports Club and is a member of Monmouth’s IEEE/ACM Club, where he assisted in successfully organizing the high school programming competition in Spring 2024.
The Upsilon Pi Epsilon Association (UPE) is the only international honor society for the computing and information disciplines, with chapters in more than 300 colleges and universities in North America and overseas. The mission of the Kappa Chapter of Upsilon Pi Epsilon at Monmouth University is to recognize academic excellence in the computing and information disciplines at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Membership in UPE is primarily based on the academic records of students pursuing degrees in the computing and information disciplines.
We are thrilled to announce that Professor Weihao Qu was awarded an NSF CRII grant titled: Precise Formal Verification of General Relational Quantitative Properties with Mutable Arrays. The award is for nearly $180,000 for work over the next two years.
Project Summary: Modern software systems often juggle sensitive data, user privacy, and efficiency, all while navigating complex real-world scenarios. To ensure these qualities, researchers rely on relational reasoning, analyzing how a program behaves with different inputs or under varying conditions. While this approach is powerful, current tools often fall short when it comes to handling features like mutable arrays, a key data structure in many practical applications.
This groundbreaking project introduces a new formal verification framework designed to overcome these challenges, enabling precise and general analysis of programs that use mutable arrays. By employing fine-grained techniques, the framework captures the behavior of individual array elements instead of treating arrays as a whole. This approach leads to significantly more detailed and accurate verification results.
The research also pushes the boundaries of relational reasoning by generalizing existing methods to support a wider range of relational quantitative properties. These advancements will be integrated into a unified framework, blending theoretical breakthroughs with practical tools, and rigorously evaluated on real-world software. By addressing critical gaps in precision and applicability, this work has the potential to reshape how we understand and verify software, paving the way for systems that are more secure, private, and efficient. This project not only bridges theoretical and practical divides but also sets a new standard for software correctness and reliability in an increasingly data-driven world.
