TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Dr. Shahram Rahimi was recently named head of the Department of Computer Science at The University of Alabama College of Engineering. He will assume the role on Jan. 1, 2025.
Rahimi joins the College following his tenure as the Gloria & Douglas Marchant Endowed Chair Professor and head of the Department of Computer Science at Mississippi State University. Prior to this, he was professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science at Southern Illinois University.
“We are excited to have Dr. Rahimi join us here at UA to lead our Department of Computer Science. Shahram brings a wealth of knowledge and experience as both a leading computer science researcher and an academic, and I believe he is ideally suited to help our CS department rise in productivity, impact, and stature amongst the best CS programs nationwide,” said College of Engineering Dean Clifford Henderson. “The future is indeed incredibly bright for both our College and our Department of Computer Science, and with Dr. Rahimi’s leadership, I fully expect to see amazing developments for the department and its faculty, staff, and students in the coming years.”
Consistent with the College of Engineering and UA’s strategic initiatives, Rahimi says he plans to work on growing the department’s impact by hiring exceptional faculty, increasing the size and quality of graduate programs, and strengthening impact to achieve prestige. He also intends to encourage undergraduate involvement in research, enhance interdisciplinary student opportunities, and practice proactive intervention and centralized tutoring to improve retention and enhance the student experience.
“I am looking forward to joining the College and the department’s efforts in promoting and boosting the tradition of cultivating an innovative, inclusive, and impactful computer science department that excels in research, education, and community engagement, and to establish one of the nation’s leading CS departments,” Rahimi said.
In addition to being appointed department head, he will also serve as chief computational science advisor to the Alabama Cyber Institute.
“As a new member of the Alabama Cyber Institute, I am committed to help in advancing computation as a powerful catalyst for research, education, workforce development, and economic growth,” Rahimi said.
Rahimi has an extensive background in both academia and industry, including consulting for NASA and IBM. A recognized expert in artificial intelligence, he has published over 300 peer-reviewed articles and holds several patents, with others pending. He has also served as editor-in-chief for two major AI journals and sits on the editorial boards of several others. Rahimi has been a member of numerous federal task forces, advising on predictive analytics for policy and defense. His hybrid game theory system, Foresight, is widely used as a decision support tool in foreign policy. He also led the development of EmTime/Symphony, an intelligent algorithm for ER staffing, now used in over 1,000 emergency departments nationwide and recognized as one of the top 10 AI healthcare technologies by HealthTech magazine in 2018. He has organized 15 conferences on computational intelligence and multi-agent systems over the past two decades and has been the principal investigator for over $25 million in federally and industry-funded research projects.
At MSU, Rahimi secured and raised funds for numerous endowments, including a $5.5 million endowment for the Predictive Analytics and TEchnology iNTegration Lab and four new endowed professorships in their CS department. Additionally, he introduced new bachelor’s programs in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, along with a master’s in data science. Further, he advised and graduated 21 Ph.D. and 71 master’s students.
Rahimi earned a bachelor’s in computer engineering from Shahid Beheshti University; a master’s in computer architecture from Sharif University of Technology; a master’s in computer engineering technology and a master’s in computer science from The University of Southern Mississippi; and a Ph.D. in computational sciences from The University of Southern Mississippi’s graduate campus, located at NASA’s John C. Stennis Space Center.