College of Science Department Head Announcement

Dear colleagues,

Please join in welcoming the following folks to their new leadership roles. I look forward to their engagement with our department heads and directors leadership team.

Dr. Christian Collberg will serve as the interim department head for Computer Science. Christian got his Ph.D. from the University of Lund, Sweden, and taught at the University of Auckland in New Zealand before joining the University of Arizona faculty. His main research interest is computer security, in particular the so-called Man-At-The-End Attack which occurs in settings where an adversary has physical access to a device and compromises it by tampering with its hardware or software. He is the author of the first comprehensive textbook on software protection, “Surreptitious Software: Obfuscation, Watermarking, and Tamperproofing for Software Protection.” His software protection tool, Tigress, is used extensively in academia and has been licensed to industry by the university.

Dr. Joseph Shields was named Director of the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory in June. Joe was previously at Ohio University for 26 years where he served in administrative roles, including Chair of the Department of Physics & Astronomy, Interim Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, and most recently Vice President for Research & Creative Activity and Dean of the Graduate College. He received his bachelor’s degrees from the University of Kansas and Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of California at Berkeley. He held a postdoctoral appointment at Ohio State University and a Hubble Fellowship at UArizona prior to joining the faculty at Ohio University. In his research, Joe studies the physics of supermassive black holes in galaxies, using both ground-based and space-based observatories. He is an author on more than 110 papers in peer-reviewed literature and served for four years as a Scientific Editor for the Astrophysical Journal.

Dr. Konrad Zinsmaier, former interim department head, has been named department head in Neuroscience. Konrad joined our faculty at the University of Arizona in 2002. He received his Ph.D. in Neurogenetics from Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg in Germany and held a postdoctoral appointment at the California Institute of Technology. Konrad’s laboratory today has a long-standing interest in understanding molecular mechanisms that facilitate synaptic function and plasticity, and mechanisms that protect synapses from neurodegeneration. The laboratory pursues these goals by utilizing a multidisciplinary approach using genetically modified Drosophila as a model system. 

Congratulating Christian, Joe, and Konrad!

Carmala Garzione
Dean, College of Science