The Computing Research Association (CRA), in consultation with the National Science Foundation (NSF), has appointed six new members to the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council: 

• Kathleen Fisher, Tufts University
• William D. Gropp, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• Brian LaMacchia, Microsoft Research
• Melanie Moses, University of New Mexico
• Helen Nissenbaum, Cornell Tech
• Holly Yanco, UMass Lowell

Beginning July 1, the new members will each serve three-year terms. The CCC Council is comprised of 20 members who have expertise in diverse areas of computing. They are instrumental in leading CCC’s visioning programs, which help catalyze and enable ideas for future computing research. Members serve staggered three-year terms that rotate every July.

The CCC and CRA thank those council members whose terms end on June 30 for their exceptional dedication and service to the CCC and to the broader computing research community:

• Juliana Freire, New York University
• Keith Marzullo, University of Maryland
• Greg Morrisett, Cornell Tech University
• Jen Rexford, Princeton University
• Ben Zorn, Microsoft Research

The CCC encourages participation from all members of the computing research community in our various activities. Each year, the CCC issues a call for proposals for visioning activities. Each spring, the CCC issues a call for nominations for Council members effective the following July. For more information, please visit the CCC website or contact Dr. Ann Schwartz Drobnis, CCC Director, at adrobnis@cra.org.

Full Bios of New CCC Council Members

Kathleen Fisher

Kathleen Fisher is Chair of the Computer Science Department at Tufts University. Previously, she was a program manager at DARPA where she started and managed the HACMS and PPAML programs, a Consulting Faculty Member in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, and a Principal Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Labs Research. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. Kathleen is an ACM Fellow and a Hertz Foundation Fellow. Service to the community has been a hallmark of Kathleen’s career. She has served as Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group in Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) and as Program Chair for three of SIGPLAN’s marquee conferences: PLDI, OOPSLA, ICFP. She has also served as an Associate Editor for TOPLAS and as an Editor of the Journal of Functional Programming. Kathleen has long been a leader in the effort to increase diversity and inclusion in Computer Science: she was Co-Chair of the Computing Research Association’s Committee on the Status of Women (CRA-W) for three years, and she co-founded SIGPLAN’s Programming Language Mentoring Workshop (PLMW) Series. Kathleen is a recipient of the SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award. She is Chair of DARPA’s ISAT Study Group and a member of the Board of Trustees of Harvey Mudd College.

William D. Gropp

William Gropp received his B.S. in Mathematics from Case Western Reserve University in 1977, a MS in Physics from the University of Washington in 1978, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford in 1982. He held the positions of assistant (1982-1988) and associate (1988-1990) professor in the Computer Science Department at Yale University. In 1990, he joined the Numerical Analysis group at Argonne, where he was a Senior Computer Scientist in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division, a Senior Scientist in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, and a Senior Fellow in the Argonne-Chicago Computation Institute. From 2000 through 2006, he was also Deputy Director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne. In 2007, he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as the Paul and Cynthia Saylor Professor in the Department of Computer Science. From 2008 to 2014 he was the Deputy Director for Research for the Institute of Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies at the University of Illinois. In 2011, he became the founding Director of the Parallel Computing Institute. In 2013, he was named the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science. In 2016, he was appointed as Acting Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and in 2017, became Director of NCSA. His research interests are in parallel computing, software for scientific computing, and numerical methods for partial differential equations. He has played a major role in the development of the MPI message-passing standard. He is co-author of the most widely used implementation of MPI, MPICH, and was involved in the MPI Forum as a chapter author for MPI-1, MPI-2, and MPI-3. He has written many books and papers on MPI including “Using MPI” and “Using MPI-2”. He is also one of the designers of the PETSc parallel numerical library and has developed efficient and scalable parallel algorithms for the solution of linear and nonlinear equations. With the other members of the PETSc core team, he was awarded the SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering in 2015. Gropp is a Fellow of AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and SIAM, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He received the Sidney Fernbach Award from the IEEE Computer Society in 2008, the SIAM-SC Career Award in 2014, and the Ken Kennedy Award from the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society in 2016.

Brian LaMacchia

Brian LaMacchia is a Microsoft Corporation Distinguished Engineer and heads the Security and Cryptography team within Microsoft Research (MSR).  His team’s main project at present is the development of quantum-resistant public-key cryptographic algorithms and protocols. Brian is also a founding member of the Microsoft Cryptography Review Board and consults on security and cryptography architectures, protocols and implementations across the company. Before moving into MSR in 2009, Brian was the Architect for cryptography in Windows Security, Development Lead for .NET Framework Security and Program Manager for core cryptography in Windows 2000. Prior to joining Microsoft, Brian was a member of the Public Policy Research Group at AT&T Labs—Research.

In addition to his responsibilities at Microsoft, Brian is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University-Bloomington and an Affiliate Faculty member of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Brian also currently serves as Treasurer of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) and as a Vice President of the Board of Directors of Seattle Opera. Brian received S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 1990, 1991, and 1996, respectively.

Melanie Moses

Melanie Moses is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico and an External Faculty Member at the Santa Fe Institute. She studies complex biological and information systems, the scaling properties of networks, and the general rules governing the acquisition of energy and information in complex adaptive systems. She models distributed search processes in ant colonies and immune systems, and she designs bio-inspired, scalable swarms of robots that can autonomously cooperate and adapt to environmental conditions. She draws insights, tools, and approaches from different disciplines in an effort to find unifying principles in nature and computation.Her Ph.D is in Biology from the University of New Mexico and she has a B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University with a concentration in Agent Based Modeling. She has led the NASA Swarmathon and NM CSforAll to engage thousands of women and underrepresented minority students in computer science research and education.

Helen Nissenbaum

Helen Nissenbaum is a Professor of Information Science at Cornell Tech, Cornell University, where she is director of the Digital Life Initiative. Her research takes an ethical perspective on policy, law, science, and engineering relating to information technology, computing, digital media, and data science. Topics have included privacy, trust, accountability, security, and values in technology design. Her books include Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest, with Finn Brunton (MIT Press, 2015), Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford, 2010), and Values at Play in Digital Games, with Mary Flanagan (MIT Press, 2014). Grants from the NSF, AFOSR, and the U.S. DHHS-ONC have supported her work. Recipient of the 2014 Barwise Prize of the American Philosophical Association, Nissenbaum has contributed to privacy-enhancing software, including TrackMeNot and AdNauseam. Nissenbaum holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University and a B.A. (Hons) in philosophy and mathematics from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

Holly Yanco

Dr. Holly Yanco is a Distinguished University Professor, Professor of Computer Science, and Director of the New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her research interests include human-robot interaction, evaluation metrics and methods for robot systems, and the use of robots in K-12 education to broaden participation in computer science. Application domains for her research include assistive technology, urban search and rescue, manufacturing, and exoskeletons. Yanco’s research has been funded by NSF, including a CAREER Award, the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Institute, ARO, CCDC-SC, DARPA, DOE-EM, ONR, NASA, NIST, Google, Microsoft, and Verizon. Yanco is Co-Chair of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council’s Robotics Cluster, served as Co-Chair of the Steering Committee for the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction from 2013-2016, and was a member of the Executive Council of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) from 2006-2009. Yanco has a PhD and MS in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BA in Computer Science and Philosophy from Wellesley College

Learn more about the CCC Council and its members on our webpage!