Meet The Leadership

Nora Lewis, Vice Dean for Professional and Liberal Education

Nora Lewis, appointed Vice Dean for Professional and Liberal Education in 2010, has been a member of the full-time professional staff in the School of Arts & Sciences since 1993. Prior to becoming Vice Dean, she was Executive Director of the College of Liberal & Professional Studies (LPS). She has also served as Executive Director of LPS and interim director of Penn’s English Language Programs.

Lewis has 20 years of experience in international higher education. Her responsibilities have included teaching English as a second language, program development and coordination, marketing, recruitment, student services and advising, and general administration. Her publications include journal articles and book chapters on the role of input and interaction in second language acquisition (with Teresa Pica and Lloyd Holliday); on intergenerational approaches to adult literacy and ESL programming (with Gail Weinstein-Shr); and on language planning and policy in the former Soviet republics. Her research interests focus on the role of learner production and feedback in second language acquisition. She is a member of NAFSA, AACRAO, TESOL, and UPCEA.

Lewis holds a B.A. in English from the College of William and Mary and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Educational Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Boon Thau Loo, Ph.D., Associate Dean for Graduate Programs

Boon Thau Loo is the RCA Professor in the Computer and Information Science (CIS) department at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a secondary appointment in the Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE) department. He is also the Associate Dean for Graduate Programs, where he oversees all academic and admissions operations for doctoral, master’s and professional programs (on-campus and online) at Penn Engineering. He leads the NetDB@Penn research team, and is also currently the director of the Distributed Systems Laboratory (DSL), an inter-disciplinary systems research lab bringing together researchers in networking, distributed systems, and security. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 2006. Prior to his Ph.D., he received his M.S. degree from Stanford University in 2000, and his B.S. degree with highest honors from University of California-Berkeley in 1999. His research focuses on distributed data management systems, Internet-scale query processing, and the application of data-centric techniques and formal methods to the design, analysis and implementation of networked systems. He was awarded the 2006 David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize for the most outstanding dissertation research in the Department of EECS at University of California-Berkeley, and the 2007 ACM SIGMOD Dissertation Award. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award (2009), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Award (2012), Penn’s Emerging Inventor of the year award (2018), the Ruth and Joel Spira award for Excellence in Teaching (2021), and the University Lindback award for distinguished teaching (2022). He has published 160+ peer reviewed publications and has graduated sixteen Ph.D. students and three postdocs. His graduated doctoral students include three tenured professors, four current tenure-track professors, and winners of five dissertation awards.

As Associate Dean, he has launched several new initiatives, including launching the Penn Engineering Online office, the accelerated master’s program, annual graduate students awards, Dean’s Doctoral Diversity fellowship, Dean’s master’s fellowship, the bridge-to-Ph.D. master’s fellowships for underrepresented minority students, MCIT Online (first Ivy League fully online master’s degree program in computer science for non-computer science majors), MSE-DS (online data science master’s program), lifelong learning for alums via Penn Engineering online, school-wide professional development course for master’s students, semester-long academic field studies for master’s students, and technology bootcamps on cybersecurity and data science in collaboration with Penn’s College of Liberal and Professional Studies for mid-career professionals in the greater Philadelphia area.

In addition to his academic work, he actively participates in entrepreneurial activities and has co-founded two technology companies that were successfully acquired. He was the co-founder and Chief Scientist at Termaxia, a software-defined energy-efficient big data storage startup based in Philadelphia that he started in 2015. Termaxia was acquired five years later in 2020 by Frontiir, one of the fastest growing technology companies in Southeast-Asia. He currently serves as Frontiir’s executive advisor and helped establish Frontiir’s Philadelphia R&D center. Prior to Termaxia, he was the founding CEO of Gencore Systems (Netsil) in 2014, a cloud microservices analytics company that spun out of his research team at Penn, commercializing his research on the Scalanytics declarative analytics platform. The company was acquired by a public cloud company Nutanix Inc in 2018. He has also published several papers with industry partners (e.g AT&T, HP Labs, Intel, Microsoft, Perspecta Labs, Raytheon BBN) applying research on real-world systems that result in production deployment and patents.

Dr. Andreas Haeberlen, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Computer and Information Science

Andreas Haeberlen is a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include distributed systems, networking, security, and privacy. He is a recipient of the Lindback Award and the Max Planck Society’s Otto Hahn medal. Recently he has been working on secure network provenance, differential privacy, and a radical redesign of the current data-center architecture.

Dr. Masao Sako, Ph.D., Arifa Hasan Ahmad and Nada Al Shoaibi Presidential Professor of Physics and Astronomy

Masao Sako is the Arifa Hasan Ahmad and Nada Al Shoaibi Presidential Professor of Physics and Astronomy. His research focuses on observational cosmology with supernovae (SNe). Measurements of luminosity distances to Type Ia SNe have shown that our Universe is dominated by an unknown component called dark energy, which is causing the expansion of the Universe to accelerate. His group is involved in current (DES) and future (LSST, Roman) large-scale optical surveys that will discover thousands of SNe that will be used to map out the detailed expansion history of the Universe.

His group is actively involved in developing machine learning and deep learning methods, which are replacing and superceding many traditional data analysis methods in astronomy and cosmology. They are also investigating the use of GPUs for image analyses.