Faculty Excellence

An endowed professorship or fellowship is one of the most important gifts you can make to a university; it's a critical tool to establish faculty excellence.

We're determined to meet the challenges of providing our graduates a stellar education while pushing the boundaries of research. Our study goes beyond the desire to know and understand; we want to make a difference.

You can help us meet those goals and be a part of advancing fields of knowledge. Financial support is needed to recruit nationally distinguished faculty members and retain the first-class talent that we currently have.

An endowed fellowship or professorship attracts and supports the academic and research efforts of an exceptional faculty member – a distinguished leader in his/her field of computer science, information technology or engineering. An endowment is a gift that establishes a permanent fund. The principal of the gift is never spent. Only the income earned on the principal is used for the purposes the donor specifies in the endowment.

Mary (Missy) Cummings
First American Bank Endowed Chair

Professor, Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering

Director of the Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center

Mary (Missy) Cummings received her BS in Mathematics from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1988, her MS in Space Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1994, and her PhD in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2004. A naval officer and military pilot from 1988-1999, she was one of the U.S. Navy's first female fighter pilots. She is an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Fellow and recently served as the senior safety advisor to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Her research interests include the application of artificial intelligence in safety-critical systems, assured autonomy, human-systems engineering, and the ethical and social impact of technology.

Her faculty appointment spans three departments—Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering. Cummings' scholarly work will include opportunities to work with Fuse at Mason Square faculty and partners. Fuse will launch in 2024.

Elise Miller-Hooks
Bill and Eleanor Hazel Endowed Chair

Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering

Elise Miller-Hooks joined the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering in 2016 as the Hazel Endowed Chair. 

Before joining our faculty, she served as Program Director of the National Science Foundation’s Civil Infrastructure Systems Program in the Engineering Directorate. A prolific writer and frequent speaker, Miller-Hooks has authored approximately 350 peer-reviewed articles, reports, conference presentations, and invited lectures. She serves as Chair of the TRB Transportation Network Modeling Committee and was the founding co-chair of the TRB Task Force on Emergency Evacuation (now a full committee), President of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences Transportation Science and Logistics Society, and President of the Women in Operations Research/Management Sciences Forum.

She also served as a professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland and on the faculty of Penn State and Duke Universities.

David Rosenblum
Planning Research Corporation Chair

Professor and Chair, Department of Computer Science

David Rosenblum has enjoyed a varied career with positions at a leading industry research lab (Bell Labs at Murray Hill), a technology startup (PreCache, where he served as CTO and Principal Architect), and academic institutions on three continents (UC Irvine, University College London and the National University of Singapore). He brings significant leadership experience to Mason, where he leads the Computer Science Department. While his "home" research area is software engineering, throughout his career, he has found inspiration in problems from other areas of computer science, with publications in distributed systems, networks, and AI. His current research focuses on software testing and verification challenges arising from the extensive use of machine learning and deep learning in software development.

His research has earned him recognition as a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE, as well as two "test-of-time" awards, including the ICSE 2002 Most Influential Paper Award for his ICSE 1992 paper on assertion checking and the inaugural ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award in 2008 for his ESEC/FSE 1997 on Internet-scale event observation and notification (co-authored with Alexander L. Wolf).  He also has been active in service to the international software engineering community, including service as Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (ACM TOSEM) and Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group in Software Engineering (ACM SIGSOFT).  In recognition of this service, he received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award in 2018. 

Sushil Jajodia
BDM International Professor

Distinguished University Professor, Information Technology

Sushil Jajodia is the founding director of the Center for Secure Information Systems at the College of Engineering and Computing and is also the founding site director of the recently approved NSF I/UCRC Center for Configuration Analytics and Automation at Mason.  He joined Mason after serving as the director of the Database and Expert Systems Program within the Division of Information, Robotics, and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Milan, Italy; Sapienza University of Rome, Italy; Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge University, England; King's College, London, England; Paris Dauphine University, France; and Imperial College, London, England.​

David Lattanzi
John Toups Faculty Fellow

Associate Professor, Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering

David Lattanzi is a licensed bridge engineer who puts his professional experience to work in the development of the next generation of infrastructure inspection technologies. Responding to the crisis of our nation’s aging infrastructure, Lattanzi’s group focuses on a multidisciplinary combination of data analytics, robotics, artificial intelligence, and structural engineering to help civil engineers make safer and more reliable life-cycle assessments. Some of his current initiatives include the use of digital image analysis for rapid post-disaster assessments and how to combine autonomous robotic inspection with ultra-high resolution 3D imaging to create virtual worlds for inspectors.

“Lattanzi is a rising star with more than a million dollars of research, including grants from the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation,” says Liza Wilson Durant, associate dean of strategic initiatives and community engagement. “The Toups Fellowship enabled us to invest in Dave as a faculty leader at Mason.”

Leigh McCue
Beck Foundation Faculty Fellow

Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Before coming to Mason in 2019, Leigh McCue served as the executive director of the American Society of Naval Engineers. Her research interests include nonlinear and chaotic vessel dynamics and computational fluid dynamics. The Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, NASA, the U.S. Coast Guard, CSC, QinetiQ, and the Northeast Center for Occupational Safety and Health have supported this work.

Julie Sorenson, director of the Northeast Center for Occupational Health and Safety and frequent collaborator with McCue, says, “Dr. McCue has a rare blend of brilliance, intellect, humility, passion for research and people skills that make her a valuable collaborator and talented scientist. In the years to come, I have no doubt that she’ll be at the center of scientific advancements that contribute greatly to her community, colleagues, and humanity.”

McCue’s studies that develop and build upon underwater and surface unmanned vehicles are a recent addition to her growing and collaborative interests. Previously her work was primarily computational or analytical, but Mason’s waterfront facilities at the Potomac Science Center have enabled a more hardware-centric focus.

Last updated February 2023.