As educators, our primary mission is to prepare the next generation of citizens, innovators, and leaders. As responsible citizens we should not accept, and as a society, we cannot afford to overlook the potential contributions of any segment of the society. I strongly believe in the need to provide quality mentoring to all of our students and in the need to be inclusive and proactively seeking the representation and the contribution of groups that have been under-represented in our respective field. We have been grateful in the past few years to receive support from NSF (since 2001) and from NSF and NIH (since 2006) to support activities specifically targeted towards mentoring of students into research and innovation and targeted towards increasing the number of women and minorities in the fields of Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Bioengineering. The NSF-funded UnCoRe program has been running for 5 years and has allowed us to recruit students from non research institutions, a high percentage of which are women and minority, and open new doors and opportunities for them. Most of these students leave with research accomplishments that they then publish and present in professional conferences. Most importantly many of these students come with no plan on pursuing graduate school, but end up applying and enrolling in graduate programs, many with scholarships. The SIBHI program funded by NSF and NIH has run its very successful first year in the summer of 2006 with the very generous mentoring by faculty from Engineering, Biology, Nursing, and Health Sciences. The SIBHI program allowed us to recruit graduate and undergraduate students from a diversity of majors, a good percentage of which are minority, and mentor them in research in Bioengineering and Health Informatics. We are currently preparing our second year and looking forward to the synergy between the multi- disciplinary team of faculty mentors and the diverse group of students from different schools, different majors, and different talents.

Courses taught recently:

1. CIT 122: Computer Animation
  (TA: Ankur Acharya/aacharya@oakland.edu)

2. CSE 343/APM 381: Theory of Computation.

3. CSE 345: Database Design

4. CSE 538: Software Verification

5. CSE 545: Database Systems

6. CSE 645 Advanced Database Systems