Welcoming Our New Faculty for Fall 2025
Five new faculty members now call the Department of Computer Science home.
From cultural analytics and software engineering, to machine learning and neuro-symbolic AI, these talented scientists bring a wealth of new knowledge to our teaching and research missions. Please join us in welcoming them to CU Boulder!
Assistant Professor
Antoniak's research is in natural language processing (NLP), cultural analytics and healthcare. She earned a PhD in information science from Cornell University, worked at the Allen Institute for AI and completed a postdoc at the Pioneer Centre for AI in Copenhagen.
Assistant Research Professor
Jafarpour received his PhD in mathematics and statistics from Queen’s University, Canada. His primary research interest is in the safety, learning and control of autonomous systems with applications to robotic systems and multi-agent cyber-physical networks.
Assistant Research Professor
Thompson developed the Ratel and libCEED libraries as part of CU Boulder's PSAAP center. He completed his PhD in applied mathematics from CU Boulder in 2021. His research interests include preconditioning for high order finite element-like operators and sustainable open-source scientific software development.
Assistant Professor
Alvaro Velasquez is also a program manager at DARPA, where he leads programs on neuro-symbolic AI and autonomy. Previously, he oversaw the machine intelligence portfolio for the Information Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).
Assistant Professor
Zhao's research lies at the intersection of computer systems and machine learning. He builds systems for training and deploying large-scale ML models, with a focus on improving the scalability, efficiency and security of end-to-end ML pipelines. Zhao completed his PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford University.