Faculty

The following faculty members will welcome REU students to work in their labs. The REU students will have the opportunity to interact with one or more faculty members, graduate students and undergraduates.

Dr. Jugal Kalita

Jugal Kalita works in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. He has supervised 52 undergraduate research projects during his tenure at UCCS. During the past ten years, Dr. Kalita’s NSF Scholarship grants have provided a total of almost 300 scholarships to more than 125 undergraduate students in the range $2,250-$7,500 per year. He encourages these students to engage in research in faculty labs. Dr. Kalita has also supervised 20+ REU students during the past five years. With these REU students, he has published 15+ papers with REU co-authors, most as first authors. These REU students are now at University of Michigan, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Texas-Austin, Stanford University, University of Colorado--Boulder, among other universities. Two have won prestigious NSF Graduate Fellowships. During his career, Dr. Kalita has also supervised 63 MS students and 14 Ph.D. students.

Dr. Terrance Boult

Terrance Boult works in the areas of Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Entrepreneurship.  He has a well-established history of involving undergraduates and underrepresented populations in his research, with a total of over 100 undergraduate students funded on research programs over his career.  An exemplar REU student, who actually started working with Dr. Boult is Michael Wilbur.  When Michael started working with Dr. Boult he did not think he was up for doing research. Rather, he was expecting to just get a job after a bachelors or maybe becoming a high school teacher.  Michael was one of our REU students for two years, and was also directly supported by Dr. Boult on research grants.  When he graduated, Michael had 4 published papers, three as first author. He also had 2 pending papers and a pending patent.  Michael was accepted with funding by 7 top Ph.D. programs and won an NSF graduate scholarship. He will be pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of California at San Diego, having chosen it over CMU and UIUC.  This is just an example; all of the REU students to work with Dr. Boult in the previous REU site grant, are in graduate schools, ranging from U Mass Amherst to UCF to UCCS.  Dr. Boult has directed 29 Ph.D. students to completion in addition to 75+ MS theses.

Dr. Qing Yi

Qing Yi has been actively involving undergraduate students in her research. Dr. Yi is an NSF Career Awardee who has moved from the University of Texas at San Antonio to UCCS two years ago. She is actively involved in building software development tools to improve both the productivity and efficiency of programming. Her areas of expertise include complier construction, programming language and software engineering. Her research is supported by several NSF and DOE grants. She is supervising 3 Ph.D. students and has graduated 1 MS student.

Dr. Rory Lewis

Rory Lewis advised 2 undergraduates for his NSF SBIR project. He taught them how to draw a storyboard from client wishes first and only then create architecture for the code. Dr. Rory Lewis works in the areas of machine learning and data mining. In addition to being an Assistant Professor at UCCS, he is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado Denver's Anschutz Medical Campus (Department of Neurology and Department of Pediatrics). His interests include time-variant signal analysis in Neurosciences and Financial Engineering. Dr. Lewis has graduated 2 MS students.

Dr. Kristen Walcott-Justice

Kristen Walcott-Justice’s research interests lie in the area of software testing and computer architecture. Her dissertation work was completed in May 2012 at the University of Virginia under the supervision of Dr. Mary Lou Soffa on how hardware performance monitors and mechanisms can be exploited for use in software testing. She is an Assistant Professor at UCCS.As a graduate student, Kristen Walcott-Justice mentored an undergraduate student in 2006 and 2007.  This work together resulted in a paper at a top conference workshop.  She has mentored several other undergraduates as well, particularly through Girls in STEM, ACM, ACM-W, and SWE groups.