Foster appointed department chair

The School of Engineering is pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Jeff Foster as chair of the Department of Computer Science, effective September 1, 2021.

Foster received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkley. Before joining Tufts University School of Engineering in 2018, he served as a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park in the Department of Computer Science and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).

His research focuses on developing practical tools and techniques to improve software quality and security. He also studies programming languages and system design and development. Connecting the theoretical with the practical, Foster’s work has crucial applications in academics and in the technical community at large.

He received a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in 2004 and the Outstanding Director of Graduate Studies Award from the University of Maryland in 2017. He was recently elected Chair of the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) and he received the 2020 Most Influential POPL Paper Award at the Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, recognizing his co-authored paper as the most influential paper published at POPL 2010 over the past decade.

Foster is a skilled administrator with a strong commitment to increasing diversity and creating a welcoming environment for all to succeed and thrive. As Associate Chair for Graduate Education at the University of Maryland, he instituted practices to combat bias and admit more students from underrepresented groups. He has helped lead diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) initiatives as the associate chair of Tufts’ Department of Computer Science.

The School of Engineering thanks Professor Kathleen Fisher for her leadership of the department over the past five years and wishes her well in the next phase of her career at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).