The Computer Science Department at George Washington University has great opportunities for potential faculty, PhD students, and undergrads. Here’s why you should join us!

For Potential Faculty…

GW provides the rare combination of the facilities and resources needed to run an impactful research program, with a small, high quality undergraduate program, all brought together in an amazing metropolitan location. GW’s strong faculty and prime location will allow you to recruit excellent Ph.D. and M.S. students to pursue cutting-edge sponsored research. The university provides infrastructure (an HPC cluster, startup incubation, a fabulous new building opened, etc.) and incentives (junior researcher awards, internal grants, excellent overhead reimbursement, etc.) to encourage and reward top quality publications and impactful research. In contrast to some larger CS departments that admit 1,000 or more undergraduate students per year, we accept closer to 75. This means your undergraduate teaching can focus on getting to know your students and engaging them in interesting projects. Located just a few blocks from the White House, our campus will give you easy access to funding agencies such as NSF which are just a short metro ride away.

With only ~15 tenure-track faculty, we are a small department that excels in a few areas, notably systems/networking, security/cryptography, and data science/machine learning. While many top-ranked CS programs are substantially larger than us, we focus on quality in these areas. Our small size means that new faculty can have a significant voice in the direction of the department. With $3.4 million in research expenditures per year, our per-faculty funding rates are competitive with top programs around the country. While rankings tend to be biased towards larger schools, we believe that our small “boutique” department offers a unique opportunity for faculty who want to make a strong impact on their school’s community. Our department and school offer many opportunities for interdisciplinary impact, including our Designing Trustworthy AI Systems fellowship and Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics. Finally, we are proud to be part of a school that emphasizes and succeeds at promoting diversity – 37% of our undergraduate students are women (more than double the national average) and we are working hard to raise that number higher by making CS a welcoming and fascinating discipline for all.

Why join the CS faculty at GW? Because it will give you the opportunity to be a complete academic—you will join a vibrant intellectual community that will provide the resources you need to excel at and enjoy your research and teaching, while giving you a substantial say in how our department evolves and connects to our nation’s capital.

For Potential Undergraduates…

As part of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), GW CS provides a close-knit community inside a large university. Our students have access to a comprehensive university and all the opportunities of being in the nation’s capital. At the same time, they have small classes and the chance to work closely with world-class faculty. The CS department offers both BS and BA degrees, allowing students to choose from depth in their technical field, or breadth across computer science and another discipline. Our students go on to work at top companies like Google and Facebook, join DC-area government contractors like MITRE, begin their own start-up companies, or pursue research at top-ranked graduate programs. We also have many specialized opportunities such as our Scholarship for Service program that gives students grants to pursue an education related to cyber security. Finally, the capstone of our CS degree is a year-long senior design project where students work alone or in a small team to build a substantial project, gaining practice presenting and writing about their work along the way. Our small-size permits close student mentoring that is simply infeasible at many other schools.

Why join the CS undergraduate program at GW? Because you will get the attention and opportunities of a small-school combined with the resources of the largest university in the nation’s capital.

For Potential Ph.D. Students…

Our Ph.D. program has ~40 students spread across 16 tenure-track faculty with internationally renowned expertise in areas such as systems/networking, security/cryptography, and data science/machine learning. This gives you the opportunity to work closely with an expert in your field of choice, solving problems and publishing research to advance the state of the art. Our students work in beautiful labs in our new Science and Engineering Hall building, in the heart of the nation’s capital.

Students joining my group can expect a close mentoring relationship that will teach you how to think about distributed systems problems and implement real solutions. You will work with me and other students in the lab to build prototypes that solve these problems, with the goals of publishing results at top quality conferences and working with our industry collaborators to impact real products. My students do internships at research labs such as IBM, AT&T, and HP Labs, and have gone on to join industrial research labs, startups, or universities. While GW’s engineering school is relatively small, there is a strong core of systems researchers across CS and ECE, and I have particularly strong ties to Profs. Gabe Parmer, Sibin Mohan, Jie Zhou, and Howie Huang.

Why join the CS graduate program at GW? Because you will join a small, focused Ph.D. community and learn to solve difficult problems by building real systems.