New Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty on Computer Science
Shirley Moore, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science
Moore is returning to the UTEP Department of Computer Science after working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) for four years as a senior computer scientist. ORNL is the largest U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) science and energy laboratory. Moore’s research focuses on evaluation of emerging hardware technologies, parallel and distributed system design and evaluation, and performance evaluation and optimization of scientific and machine learning applications. She earned her doctoral degree in computer science from Purdue University, a master’s degree in mathematics from Wichita State University, a master’s in science education from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a bachelor’s in mathematics and chemistry from Indiana University Bloomington. Moore is a senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery, and a founding member of the Performance Application Programming Interface (PAPI) project. Her work on PAPI earned her and research colleagues the R&D 100 Award in 2001. The R&D 100 Awards recognize the most promising new products, processes, materials, or software developed throughout the world. During her career at ORNL, Moore has been the ORNL point of contact and lead for several initiatives in the Exascale Computing Project, a monumental DOE initiative to advance scientific and computational capabilities to the exascale in less than a decade. During her downtime, she enjoys open-water swimming, spending time with her three dogs, and playing the piano and guitar. Moore shares that she is excited to return to UTEP, and is looking forward to joining the Computer Science Department and collaborating with faculty and students on teaching and research.
Saeid Tizpaz-Niari, Ph.D
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science
Tizpaz-Niari joins UTEP from the University of Colorado Boulder, where he was a member of the Programming Languages and Verification Group (CUPLV). He is primarily interested in addressing cybersecurity and performance challenges in software, machine learning, and cyber-physical systems. In addition, he is interested in developing tools and techniques to guarantee privacy and fairness in algorithmic inferences. Tizpaz-Niari earned his doctoral degree in computer engineering from CU Boulder, a master’s degree in information technology engineering from the Sharif University of Technology in Iran, and a bachelor’s degree in information technology engineering from Tabriz University in Iran. While at CU Boulder, he served as a team leader of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Space/Time Analysis for Cybersecurity (STAC) Program. Tizpaz-Niari is the first author of multiple publications that have been presented in top-tier computer science conferences such as NDSS’20 (security), AAAI’18 (artificial intelligence), CAV’19 (verification), and ISSTA’20 (software engineering). His latest publication, Detecting and Understanding Real-World Differential Performance Bugs in Machine Learning Libraries, was presented at the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA) in July 2020. Tizpaz-Niari is the recipient of the Gold Research Award from the ECEE department at CU Boulder (2018), and the Second Prize Winner of the First Microsoft Open Source Challenge (2016). He is a reviewer for the Journal of Computer Security and annual Computer Aided Verification (CAV) Conference, which focuses on theory and practice of computer aided formal analysis of software and hardware systems. During his downtime, Tizpaz-Niari enjoys hiking, running, watching soccer, solving puzzles, and playing chess. He is fluent in Persian (Farsi) and Azeri (Turkish), and enjoys learning new languages.