Libeskind-Hadas Elected to CRA Executive Committee

Ran Libeskind-Hadas, R. Michael Shanahan Professor of Computer Science, was elected to serve as secretary on the executive committee for the Computing Research Association (CRA) board of directors. The positions are elected by the CRA Board of Directors. Libeskind-Hadas’ two-year term will begin on July 1.

Libeskind-Hadas previously served as co-chair on the CRA Education Committee (CRA-E) from 2011–2017. The CRA-E focuses on promoting undergraduate research, providing resources to faculty to prepare talented students for research and encouraging undergraduate students to pursue graduate education and research careers in computing fields.

In addition to his work with the CRA, Libeskind-Hadas has served on the Computing Community Consortium (CCC). At Harvey Mudd, he has also served on the reappointment, promotion and tenure committee, the faculty executive committee and department chairs committee.

His research interests focus on algorithms for computational biology, particularly in addressing algorithmic issues in computational biology and reconciling pairs of evolutionary trees, such as gene trees, species trees and pairs of species trees. As a result of his research, Libeskind-Hadas, his students and collaborators have designed several software packages that are widely used by researchers in the life sciences.

Libeskind-Hadas has been a member of the Harvey Mudd faculty since 1993, and teaches introductory computer science courses, algorithms, advanced topics in algorithms, computational complexity theory and contributes to the introduction to computational biology course.

The CRA includes more than 200 North American organizations active in computing research: academic departments of computer science, information and computer engineering, laboratories and centers (industry, government and academia) and affiliated professional societies (AAAI, ACM, CS-Can/Info-Can, IEEE Computer Society, SIAM, USENIX).