Assefaw H. Gebremedhin

	Assefaw H. Gebremedhin

Assefaw Gebremedhin is Berry Family Distinguished Associate Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University, where he leads the Scalable Algorithms for Data Science (SCADS) Lab. He is also the Director and Lead PI of the Department of Defense-funded VICEROY Northwest Institute for Cybersecurity Education and Research (CySER), Director of the new CyberCorps Scholarship for Service (SFS) program at WSU, and Director of a Department of Education-funded Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN) program that focuses on training PhD students in AI for complex engineering applications.

Assefaw received the 2024 EECS Outstanding Program Leadership Award for contributions to cybersecurity and the 2022 Reid Miller Teaching Excellence Award from the Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture. He also received the 2021 George Polya Prize in Applied Combinatorics for joint work with Fredrik Manne and Alex Pothen, and he received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2016 for work on fast and scalable combinatorial algorithms for data analytics.

His research interests include: combinatorial scientific computing, high-performance computing, machine learning and AI, cybersecurity, and applications in bioinformatics, environmental health, and energy ecosystems. Prior to joining WSU in Fall 2014, Assefaw was a research faculty member at Purdue University, Department of Computer Science, where he served as a founding member and invesigator in the Department of Energy-funded SciDAC Institute for Combinatorial Scientific Computing and Petascale Simulations (CSCAPES). He earned his PhD and MS in Computer Science from the University of Bergen, Norway and his BS in Electrical Engineering from Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia.

A few favorites and oldies

ElevatingMath Video Competition 2019 Winner Helen Catanese (Advancing Vaccine Development with Network Science)

2021 SIAM Prize Recipients Video

SIAM CSC'16 Website (program, slides, history, pictures, and more)

Address

Email: assefaw.gebremedhin@wsu.edu

Telephone: (509) 335-3952

Office: EME B43

Teaching Fall 2024 Semester:

CptS 317: Automata and Formal Languages (Syllabus)

CptS 475: Data Science (Syllabus)

CptS 575: Data Science (Syllabus)

Current Graduate Students:

James Crabb, Postdoc, started Spring 2024. Topic: Cybersecurity education.
Tashi Stirewalt, PhD student, started Fall 2023. Topic: Cybersecurity.
Harrison Greenlee, PhD student, started Spring 2023. Topic: Computational epidemiology.
Coby Soss, PhD student, started Fall 2021. Topic: Graph algorithms and AI.
Funso Oje, PhD student, started Fall 2021. Topic: Data science and environmental health.
Stephanie Kane, PhD student (IID program), co-advised with Jan Dasgupta. Topic: Responsible data science.

Former Graduate Students (SCADS Lab Graduates):

Jarren Briscoe, PhD, co-advised with Diane Cook, Graduated April 2026.
- Thesis Title: Toward Accountable AI Systems: Objective Fairness, Evaluation, and Robustness.
- Abstract
- Current Position: TBD
Shruti Patil, PhD, Graduated April 2026
- Thesis Title: Geospatial and Network Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 Mutations and Cancer for Understanding Disease Patterns.
- Abstract
- Current Position: Data Scientist at Capital One.
James Halvorsen, PhD, Graduated April 2026
- Thesis Title: Machine Learning for Network Security: Metrics, Algorithms, and Applications.
- Abstract
- Current Position: TBD.
Zayn Abou-Harb, MS, Graduated April 2026
- Thesis Title: Interpretable Ensemble Methods for Geospatial Vortex Detection and Time Series Forecasting
- Abstract
- Current Position: Software Engineer at Epic
Deven Biehler, MS, Graduated Dec 2025
- Thesis Title: Scalable Geospatial Algorithms for Flow Modeling
- Abstract
- Current Position: Software Engineer at Northwest Marine Technology
James Crabb, MS, Graduated December 2023.
- Thesis Title: A Critical Review of Cybersecurity Education in the United States
- Abstract
- Current Position: Postdoc at WSU
Xu (Tony) Liu, PhD, Graduated July 2021. Tony was WSU-PNNL Distiguished Graduate Research Program (DGRP) fellow (first cohort), and was co-advised by Andrew Lumsdaine.
- Thesis Title: Structure Detection in Graphs and Hypergraphs
- Abstract
- Current Position: SDE II at AWS
Yunshu Du, PhD, co-advised with Matt Taylor. Graduated April 2021.
- Thesis Title: Transfer in Deep Reinforcement Learning: How an Agent Can Leverage Knowledge from Another Agent, a Human, or Itself
- Abstract
- Current Position: Data Scientist at Sony AI
Sayan Ghosh, PhD, Graduated April 2019.
- Thesis Title: Supporting Efficient Graph Analytics and Scientific Computation using Asynchronous Distributed-Memory Programming Models
- Abstract
- Current Position: Computer Scientist at PNNL
Ramyar Saeedi, PhD, Graduated July 2018.
- Thesis Title: Efficient Machine Learning Algorithms for Automatic Reconfiguration of Mobile Health Monitoring Systems
- Abstract
- Current Position: ML Engineer at Uber
Keyvan Sasani, MS, Graduated Dec 2018.
- Thesis Title: Machine Learning for Predicting Performance of Graph Algorithms with Applications in Graph Databases and Network Similarity
- Abstract
- Current Position: Data Engineer at Meta
Helen Catanese, MS, Graduated May 2017.
- Thesis Title: RepeatAnalyzer: A Tool for Analyzing and Managing Short-Sequence Repeat Data
- Abstract
- Current Position: Senior Software Engineer at Addium