On July 31, 2014, Dr. Farnam Jahanian, Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), announced the appointment of Dr. Lynne Parker as the new Division Director for the Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) Division within the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate. Below is Dr. Jahanian’s letter to the CISE community.
Dear CISE Community,
I am pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Lynne E. Parker to the position of Division Director for the CISE Division of Information & Intelligent Systems (IIS), effective January 2015. She will be joining NSF from The University of Tennessee-Knoxville (UTK), where she is Professor and Associate Head in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She is the founder and director of the Distributed Intelligence Laboratory and was the Founding Director of the Center for Intelligent Systems and Machine Learning from 2010-2012. Dr. Parker is also a member of the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where she worked as a researcher for several years (full-time: 1986-1989, 1994-2002; part-time adjunct: 2002-2009) and where she is Assistant Director of the ORNL Science Alliance.
Dr. Parker is a widely recognized leader in the field of distributed multi-robot systems. She has published over 145 articles in the areas of mobile robot cooperation, human-robot cooperation, sensor networks, robotic learning, intelligent agent architectures, and robot navigation. These publications include five edited books on the topic of distributed robotics. She is the recipient of several awards for her research and teaching efforts, including the DOE Office of Science Early Career Scientist Award and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).
Dr. Parker received her Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), performing her research on cooperative control algorithms for multi-robot systems in MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, with a minor in brain and cognitive science. She received her M.S. degree in computer science from The University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and her B.S. degree in computer science from Tennessee Technological University, with a minor in mathematics. She is a Fellow of IEEE and an active member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.
I am confidant that Dr. Parker will provide outstanding leadership for the diverse areas of research covered in IIS and that she will contribute significantly to CISE’s mission in advancing the frontiers of computer and information science and engineering.
On behalf of the CISE Directorate, I would like to thank the external search committee members for their excellent work in identifying an extraordinary pool of candidates for this important position. Their service was invaluable in helping NSF identify an exceptional leader for IIS.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Howard Wactlar once again for his many contributions to CISE and the computing community while serving as Division Director of IIS. Howard was instrumental in several interagency and White House initiatives, including the National Robotics Initiative (NRI), Smart and Connected Health, Big Data, and BRAIN. Howard was an invaluable member of the CISE leadership team, and NSF greatly appreciates his exemplar service to the community.
In closing, the CISE Directorate enthusiastically welcomes Dr. Parker to NSF and looks forward to working with her to advance the frontiers of knowledge in information and intelligent systems.
Best regards,
Farnam
