Northwestern Computer Science Recognizes Faculty Promotions

Northwestern Engineering’s Department of Computer Science has announced the tenure and promotions of Christos Dimoulas, Miklos Racz, and Xiao Wang to associate professor.

All are effective September 1.

As specified by Northwestern’s Office of the Provost, tenure and promotion reflects a faculty member’s high level of distinction in the field and professional achievement in the areas of scholarship, creative work, research accomplishments and potential, service, and excellence in teaching.

“Our faculty has been leading the charge in research and educational activities. They are running very visible research groups with many active students” said Samir Khuller, Peter and Adrienne Barris Chair of Computer Science in the McCormick School of Engineering. “It’s great to see their hard work translated to tenure and promotions to associate professor. They bring us a lot of credit in everything that they do and have established leadership in many research areas."

Christos Dimoulas

Dimoulas received tenure and was promoted to associate professor of computer science at Northwestern Engineering.

His research combines theory and empirical experimentation to investigate programming languages pragmatics, defined as whether a programming language feature helps or hinders software developers in the context of a work task, such as debugging, testing, or refactoring code. He then employs the findings to redesign programming language features and tools with pragmatics in mind.

In 2023, Dimoulas received a US National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award to develop a new empirical technique for evaluating programming languages pragmatics. The approach imagines developers as rational actors that use a language feature to complete a work task. In the technique, such actors become computational processes, dubbed rational programmers.

The specific strategy that each rational programmer uses to decide how to act codifies a hypothesis about how a language feature helps a developer in the context of the given task. Based on this idea, Dimoulas and his group use rational programmers to conduct large-scale simulations and investigate when and how different language features help developers.

Miklos Racz

Racz received tenure and was promoted to associate professor of computer science at Northwestern Engineering and associate professor of statistics and data science at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

Racz’s research interests lie broadly at the interface of probability, statistics, computer science, and information theory, with a focus on combinatorial statistics, discrete probability, and applied probability.

He studies statistical inference questions on random graphs and other large random discrete structures, including approaches to infer the past in randomly growing graphs, infer latent geometry in high-dimensional random geometric graphs, graph matching problems in correlated random graphs, and community detection.

Racz also investigates social networks, dynamics on networks, voting, sequence reconstruction, and DNA data storage.

Xiao Wang

Wang received tenure and was promoted to associate professor of computer science at Northwestern Engineering.

Broadly interested in computer security, privacy, and cryptography, Wang works on practical multi-party computation (MPC), zero-knowledge proof, and lattice-based cryptography for application domains including machine learning, databases, formal methods, health informatics, and legal frameworks.

He earned a US NSF CAREER award in 2023 for his project on secure MPC, which enables a set of mutually untrusted parties to jointly compute a function without revealing the underlying data. He aims to design efficient, robust, and scalable protocols and software infrastructures to push the practical application of MPC.

Building on this work, Wang coauthored an interdisciplinary paper that earned the Best Paper Award at the 2025 Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on Computer Science and Law. The Northwestern Engineering and Northwestern Pritzker School of Law team proposed a statutory-technological framework for creating cryptographically secure misconduct settlement reporting registries.