2014 Distinguished Contributions

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LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 4 April 2014 – IEEE Computer Society has issued two 2014 Distinguished Contributions to Public Service in a Pre-College Environment Awards to pre-college educators.

John D. Carpinelli, professor of electrical and computer engineering and executive director of the Center for Pre-College Programs at New Jersey Institute of Technology, was cited “for outstanding contributions to pre-college STEM education with an emphasis on students from underrepresented populations.”

Nagiza Samatova, a professor with the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University, was recognized “for outstanding teaching and mentoring of pre-college students in research projects.”

Carpinelli’s research interests include engineering education research, interconnection networks, and multiprocessor systems. He primarily teaches courses in computer architecture and freshman engineering.

He is the author of “Computer Systems Organization and Architecture,” a textbook used at more than 200 universities in the United States and other countries. In 2004, Carpinelli was named a Master Teacher. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Stevens Institute of Technology, and a master’s degree and PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Samatova specializes in computational biology and high-performance data mining, knowledge discovery, and statistical data analysis. A senior research scientist in the Computational Biology Institute at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Samatova is the author of more than 200 publications, two patents, and the book “Practical Graph Mining with R.”

She received her BS degree in applied mathematics from Tashkent State University, Uzbekistan; a PhD in mathematics from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; and an MS in computer science from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Samatova has supervised dozens of young researchers, and three high school teams she mentored were national finalists in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology.