Fanti named Angel Jordan Associate Professor

The Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering has announced the most recent faculty member to receive a professorship. As the highest academic award a university can bestow on a faculty member, professorships are reserved for those who show continued contributions in their field.

Professorships are established to support a particular faculty member or a field of research, both of which are critical to maintaining world-class quality education and research. Contributions help faculty members pursue a specific field of study, provide funding for graduate student involvement, purchase equipment, or travel to share their research.

With the approval of Provost James H. Garrett, CyLab core faculty member Giulia Fanti has been named the new Angel Jordan Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, effective July 1, 2024.

Fanti’s research is in the design and engineering of systems that enable cooperation in the absence of trust. Her scholarly impact stems from distilling complex, real-world challenges into core problems in her individual technical disciplines. For example, her work on privacy in social networks led to a new probabilistic formulation of rumor source obfuscation, which complemented the growing field of epidemic source detection in the performance modeling community. This work won a best paper award at ACM SIGMETRICS 2015. Similarly, her interest in the very pragmatic problem of information sharing has led her to explore generative adversarial networks (GANs) as a tool for generating synthetic data.

Fanti is also a founding co-director of the CyLab-Africa initiative, which focuses on the security and resilience of Africa’s financial technologies and infrastructure.

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering created the Angel Jordan Professorship to honor and celebrate the undeniable impact that Angel Jordan (former ECE professor, CIT Dean, and University Provost) had on Carnegie Mellon and the College of Engineering. Throughout his career, Angel Jordan helped transform Carnegie Mellon into a world-class educational and research institution. He not only conducted research on semi-conductors, integrated circuits, thin films, intelligent sensors, robotics, automation, and software engineering, but he also helped form Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, the Robotics Institute, and the Software Engineering Institute. Overall, Jordan has made countless contributions to the science and engineering fields while also devoting his career to advancing academic excellence and technology at Carnegie Mellon.