2018-08-30: Excited to Join WS-DL group in ODU!

I am an outlier compared with most computer scientists because I spent 10 years on a field called "Astronomy and Astrophysics". Very few computer scientists followed the same path as me to transfer from a seemingly irrelevant major. But this is where my passion is, so I did it, and I made it!

Right after I graduated as a PhD in 2011, I joined the CiteSeerX group directed by Dr. C. Lee Giles at IST, Penn State University. I worked as a DBA for web crawling at the beginning and soon became the tech leader of the search engine, and recently the Co-PI of an NSF awarded proposal on CiteSeerX. I spent six years, an usually long time as a postdoc and then was promoted to a teaching faculty. However, I kept moving on, because I wanted to do research!

Luckily, Michael and Michele did not mind of taking the risk and bet on me to be a tenure-track faculty at the Old Dominion University. So I accepted the offer and became a member of the Web Science Digital Library group at ODU CS.

I appreciate many CS faculties, including but not limited to Dr. Jing He, Dr. Cong Wang, and Dr. Ravi Mukkamala, that helped me before and after I moved to Virginia Beach. Michael and Michele gave me tremendous guidance already on how to be successful. I am also glad to know Dr. Sampath Jayarathna and Dr. Jiangwen Sun as new colleagues. It is unbelievable that Sampath and I submitted our first NSF proposal before the first class began this fall!

I cherish my old friends at Penn State. I also look forward to doing more exciting work in this new position!

Posted by Jian Wu at ECSB, Norfolk, VA