Dr. M. Katherine Banks, vice chancellor and dean of engineering, has appointed Dr. Dilma Da Silva the head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University. The appointment is effective Aug. 25.
Da Silva currently serves as a principal engineer and manager at Qualcomm Research in Santa Clara, California where she leads the area of mobile cloud computing. Her prior work experience includes the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York (2000-2012) and the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil (1996-2000). She led large research initiatives around scalable and adaptive system software, focusing the last four years on cloud computing.
Da Silva received her Ph.D. in computer science from Georgia Tech in 1997 and she has published more than 80 technical papers and has filed 11 patents. She has chaired 24 conferences/workshop committees, participated in several prestigious journal editorial boards and has been a program committee member in more than 80 scientific conferences or workshops and more than 30 thesis committees.
Da Silva is an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Scientist, an ACM Distinguished Speaker, a member of the board of Computer Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research and of the Coalition for Diversifying Computing, co-founder of the Latinas in Computing group, and treasurer/secretary for ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems.