The Department of Computer Science and Engineering welcomed five new faculty members for the fall 2025 semester, making the department 84 members strong. Two of the new faculty members are based in Galveston, and the other three are in College Station. The new faculty bring expertise in cybersecurity, cryptography, machine learning, human-robot interaction, human-computer interaction and distributed systems.
The new faculty members include:
Dr. Si Liu
Dr. Si Liu, assistant professor, received his doctoral degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his master’s in computer science from East China Normal University. Liu’s research interests include formal methods, databases, distributed systems and security.
Dr. Yiwei Lyu
Dr. Yiwei Lyu, assistant professor, received her doctoral degree in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Lyu’s research interests include robotics, safe control verification, behavior planning, multi-agent systems and human-robot interaction.
Dr. Yanlai Wu
Dr. Yanlai Wu, instructional assistant professor, received her doctoral degree in engineering and computer science from the University of Central Florida and her master’s degree in education from Boston University. Wu’s research interests include cybersecurity, human-computer interaction, usable privacy and real-time privacy.
Dr. Zhiyuan Yu
Dr. Zhiyuan Yu, assistant professor, received his doctoral degree in computer science from Washington University in St. Louis. Yu’s research interests include trustworthy machine learning systems, AI-enabled cyber-physical systems, multimodal generative AI, usable and human-centric security and intelligent health care systems.
Dr. Marian Zaki
Dr. Marian Zaki, instructional associate professor, received her doctoral degree in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh and her master’s degree in computer science and information systems from Ain Shams University in Egypt. Zaki’s research interests include distributed systems, design of privacy-preserving protocols, cryptography and computer science teaching pedagogies.