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CSE Department Graduate Alumni

Below is a listing of several recent graduate alumni.

Jason Derenick
Ph.D. in Computer Science
Thesis: "A Convex Optimization Framework for Multi-Agent Motion Planning"
Advisor: Professor John Spletzer

Jason feels that choosing to pursue his doctoral degree in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh University was the best decision he’s ever made. During his doctoral studies, he was provided numerous opportunities for conducting ground-breaking research with cutting-edge technologies. Among the more memorable of his experiences was his participation in fielding the fourth-place entry (a fully-autonomous car named "Little Ben") in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. As the key doctoral student on the Ben Franklin Racing Team (a collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania, Lehigh University, and Lockheed Martin), Jason developed robust perception algorithms to facilitate high-level control and path-planning. He also went on to begin an open-source software project called The Sick LIDAR Matlab/C++ Toolbox, which has been adopted by academic and industry leaders around the world.

Jason was even recruited for a software internship at Boston Dynamics, an industrial-robotics firm best known for their military-mule BigDog. He is now a post-doctoral fellow in the GRASP Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania.

Matt Casey
Master in Computer Science
Advisor: Professor Henry Baird

After four great years as a Computer Science undergraduate at Lehigh, Matt enrolled to get a Master's degree. He states that the program afforded him time to explore topics such as artificial intelligence, database theory, and computer vision while taking time at one of Lehigh's research labs to dive deep into pattern recognition problems.

Matt is now a software engineer at Google in California, working on the OCR team. He feels that the proactive, enthusiastic support from professors as well as the variety of relevant courses offered at Lehigh provided him with the opportunity and ability to succeed at Google.

April Kontostathis
Ph.D. in Computer Science
Thesis: "A Term Co-occurrence Based Framework for Understanding LSI: Theory and Practice"
Advisor: Professor William Pottenger

April returned to graduate school full-time after working in industry for thirteen years and teaching at a community college for two years. Her goal was to complete her Ph.D. in Computer Science in order to obtain a tenure-track position at a liberal arts college. April wanted to do research in data engineering, and Lehigh had several labs that interested her.

When she finished her studies at Lehigh, she applied to several small schools in the greater Philadelphia area and received three offers from excellent schools. April accepted a position at Ursinus College, and was granted tenure in 2009. She enjoys the mix of research and teaching she has in her current position and finds that Lehigh prepared her well.