Information Science alum Amirreza Masoumzadeh (PhD'14) begins tenure track position
The School of Information Sciences (iSchool) is proud to report iSchool alum Amirreza Masoumzadeh's (PhD'14) new position at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany. Amirreza began his appointment as tenure track Assistant Professor in the Informatics Department in August 2014. Amirreza chose the iSchool for the close match between his research interests and those of several iSchool faculty members. Broadly, these interests are security and privacy in systems and data, including access and privacy control in systems (social networking systems), multi-domain environments and multi-agent systems as well as anonymization of social networks, location-based datasets and geo-social networks.
Amirreza credits his doctoral work at the iSchool with preparing him for his career by immersing him in research activities such as writing grant proposals and attending professional conferences. He advises current students looking for academic positions to "start early, apply extensively, tailor cover letters and prepare well for interviews" explaining that "unless you know 100% what your future job will be, you have to prepare in a way that you're flexible to apply for any job that might interest you when you graduate." In the next few years, Amirreza is most excited to establish his own research lab where he can conduct research in his areas of interest and to engage students in information science research. He defended his dissertation "Preserving Privacy in Social Networking Systems: Policy-Based Control and Anonymity" in August 2014. His committee consisted of Drs. James Joshi (advisor), Peter Brusilovsky, Prashant Krishnamurthy, Konstantinos Pelechrinis and Elisa Bertino (Perdue University).
While a student at the iSchool, Amirreza won the Catherine Ofiesh Orner Award (1st place) for his paper "Preserving Structural Properties in Edge-Perturbing Anonymization Techniques for Social Networks" in April 2013. The paper, co-authored with Dr. Joshi, was published in IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, (vol. 9, no. 6, pp. 877-889, Nov. 2012). You can find more of Amirreza's research on Google Scholar. Prior to coming to the iSchool, he received his M.Sc. in Computer Engineering (Software) from Sharif University of Technology, Iran and his B.Sc. in Computer Engineering (Software) from Ferdowsi University, Iran. Congratulations, Amirreza, and best wishes from the iSchool!