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Moses selected as special assistant to the dean for educational initiatives

October 3, 2023

photo: Melanie Moses
Melanie Moses

A professor in the Department of Computer Science has been selected as part of UNM School of Engineering Dean Donna Riley’s leadership team.

Melanie Moses is the new special assistant to the dean for educational initiatives. The principal responsibilities of this position will be to manage strategic initiatives related to curricular and pedagogical innovations in the School, including:

  • Working with the dean to develop and implement initiatives related to classroom transformations that foster student learning, success, belonging, well-being and retention;
  • Enhancing existing and developing new opportunities for experiential learning, including undergraduate research, making and design, community-based learning and internships;
  • Fostering and facilitating interdisciplinary educational opportunities; and
  • Identifying and creating pathways for completion of the honors program in Engineering, while leveraging honors opportunities to improve student experiences School-wide.

Moses will report to the dean and will work closely with the associate dean for academic affairs. They will also collaborate with School of Engineering department chairs and faculty to achieve the School’s strategic priorities for education innovation.

Moses joined UNM in 2005. She earned her bachelor’s degree in symbolic systems, with a concentration in agent-based modeling, from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in biology from UNM. Her career has focused on the interplay between biology and computer science, with her research being focused on computational biology and biologically-inspired computation.

She has a secondary appointment in UNM’s Department of Biology and is an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. She has taken a leading role in developing innovative ways to attract under-represented populations into computer science and engineering, including developing CSforAll, which focused on teaching computer programming to high school students and teachers, as well as college students. She also developed NASA Swarmathon, a swarm robotics challenge in which students from minority-serving institutions develop algorithms for robotics used for space exploration.