Edith Elkind and Dmitrii Pasechnik Join Northwestern Computer Science
This fall, Elkind will join Northwestern Engineering as Ginni Rometty Professor of Computer Science and Pasechnik will begin a three-year appointment as a research professor.
Northwestern Engineering’s Department of Computer Science welcomes Edith Elkind and Dmitrii Pasechnik to the faculty team this fall as part of the ongoing University growth initiative.
Edith Elkind
Elkind, a pioneer of algorithmic game theory, computational social choice, and artificial intelligence, will join Northwestern Engineering’s Department of Computer Science this fall as a Ginni Rometty Professor of Computer Science.
In 2021, a $5 million gift from IBM endowed two computer science professorships in Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering in honor of Virginia M. “Ginni” Rometty ʼ79, ʼ15 H, the first woman to lead the company. The first professorship was awarded to Jessica Hullman, associate professor of computer science at Northwestern Engineering.
Rometty, a Northwestern alumna and vice chair of the University’s Board of Trustees, retired as executive chairman of IBM in December 2020, having previously served as chairman, president, and chief executive officer. Her career at the company spanned nearly 40 years.
“I am delighted to welcome Edith to Northwestern this fall,” said Dean Christopher Schuh, John G. Searle Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern Engineering. “I am grateful to IBM and to Ginni Rometty for establishing these professorships to support pioneering faculty work in computer science.”
Currently a professor of computing science at the University of Oxford and a non-tutorial fellow at Balliol College, Elkind's research has significantly advanced the fields of computational social choice and multi-agent systems with applications in artificial intelligence.
Elkind’s honors include the 2023 Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence Autonomous Agents Research Award and the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2021 Distinguished Paper Award.
“Edith has a long track record of pioneering work in algorithmic game theory with many applications to AI,” said Samir Khuller, Peter and Adrienne Barris Chair of Computer Science. “I could not be more excited to welcome her to our faculty at Northwestern."
Prior to joining the University of Oxford in 2013, Elkind was an assistant professor and National Research Foundation Fellow at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). She earned a PhD from Princeton University in 2005 and served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Warwick, University of Liverpool, and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as a lecturer (Roberts Fellow) at the University of Southampton.
Dmitrii Pasechnik
A versatile mathematician adept in pure mathematics, applied mathematics, and mathematical software, Pasechnik will join the department with a three-year appointment as research professor.
Currently a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, Pasechnik has instructed a broad range of computer science and mathematics courses, including constructive math, continuous math, computer graphics, AI and information theory, and practicals for digital systems, computer architecture, and compilers.
Pasechnik’s research interests span many areas of mathematics. He has published more than 75 papers in international journals, investigating problems in algebra, algebraic geometry, combinatorics, graph theory, group theory, computer algebra, scientific computation, computational complexity, optimization and its applications, and formal proofs and reproducibility.
Pasechnik also develops and maintains the computer algebra systems SageMath and GAP, as well as related publicly available software packages like SciPy.
He served as a Sage Mathematical Software System mentor for Google’s Summer of Code, a global, online mentoring program focused on introducing new contributors to open source software development. He was a project mentor from 2012-18 and in 2023 and worked in a mentor and administrative capacity from 2018-20.
“I am really excited that Dima will join us, greatly enriching the department’s culture and research strengths in mathematical optimization and discrete mathematics,” Khuller said. “Dima can contribute greatly to our growth in computer science and bring much needed expertise in research in combinatorics.”
Pasechnik earned a PhD with distinction in mathematics from the University of Western Australia in 1996 and a diploma in computer science from Moscow National University of Science and Technology in 1989. He has held multiple positions at the University of Oxford since 2013, including senior research fellow and stipendiary lecturer in mathematics at Pembroke College. He also served as a research software engineer for the Department of Computer Science at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland (2019-20) and assistant professor of mathematical sciences at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (2006-13).