The Computer Science Department no longer stands alone. As of July 2012, it merged with the University’s electrical engineering program to form the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
“The LSU College of Electrical Engineering is dedicated to educating students who transform ideas into reality,” said Richard Koubek, dean of the College of Engineering, when the merger was announced last July.
Subject matter for electrical engineering often overlaps with computer science. Both subjects have strong roots in mathematics, making the merge logical.
“This allows us to be inclusive with our faculty and collaborate more together,” said Coretta Douglas, the undergraduate advisor for the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Douglas also held the position of undergraduate advisor for the Computer Science Department prior to the merger.
Computer science junior and president of the Association for Computing Machinery Morgan Hargrove said that some students were initially worried about the merge, but that the electrical engineering department was welcoming.
The merger of the two departments also has the potential to draw new faculty to the University as this August, new faculty members were hired, including Feng Chen and R. Clint Whaley.
Chen, research scientist at Intel Labs, received his Ph.D. from the Ohio State University in 2010, concentrating on memory and storage systems. Chen’s research focuses on creating hybrid storage systems, taking components from both hard disk drives and flash memory. He worked as an adviser at Intel labs in Portland, Ore., before coming to the university. His research influenced Apple’s fusion drive, he said, combining the capabilities of solid-state drives with hard disk drives.
“I saw coming to LSU as an excellent academic research opportunity,” said Chen. “I have more research flexibility.”
While he is primarily conducting research this semester, Chen will teach an operations systems course in the spring.
“I like the people here, they are all very helpful and supportive,” Chen said.
Whaley received his Ph.D from Florida State University in 2004. He also has a great deal of experience teaching, serving as an assistant professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio since 2005 and earning tenure in 2012.
Whaley developed Extract, a software management program that helps users store different versions of code or different codes in one file. He also conducts work in algebra communication programs, such as ATLAS (Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software) and BLACS (Basic Linear Algebra Communications Subprograms).
It’s too early to tell how positive the merger will be for students, said Hargrove, but the collaborations and overlapping of departments will definitely have an impact on opportunities for students of both disciplines.
“We’re not just engineering and mathematics, we’re graphics, digital media, and our programs tie into everything else,” said Douglas.
“We’re not just engineering and mathematics, we’re graphics, digital media, and our programs tie into everything else.”