As usual, the new school year is bringing changes to the School of Information Technology. Sadly, we are bidding farewell to two of our faculty members, Bryan Hosack and Amit Shesh.

Hosack joined the School in August of 2006 and taught many of our database and data warehousing classes as well as project management. He was very involved in the community and volunteered his time often. He and his family have moved to another state.

Shesh will be leaving in December and has been with us since August of 2008. Students have really enjoyed his classes in computer graphics and programming. Shesh created a Hall of Fame to showcase student assignments which can be viewed here. Shesh served as the advisor to the Association for Computing Machinery student chapter here. He and his family are also moving to another state.

In happier news, we welcome Rishi Kanth Saripalle to our Computer Science faculty this fall. He comes to us with a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Connecticut. He earned his master’s in computer engineering from the University of Massachusetts and a bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University.

His research interests include:
• Medical informatics, medical data and device interoperability, and clinical databases and warehouses, electronic medical record, health information exchange and technology
• Ontology – design, development and implementation methodologies, biomedical ontologies and taxonomies, medical data and knowledge modeling, and semantic web
• Software modeling and engineering, and domain specific meta-models
• Access control languages and frameworks, and collaborative access control mechanisms

Laurie Helms is our new undergraduate advisor. She has been with us since the spring, but this is her first full semester. Laurie earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science at Northern Illinois University and has several years of work experience in IT. She has done an outstanding job of learning the old computer system and the new computer system simultaneously in order to effectively advise our students.