CRA Welcomes New Board Members

CRA is pleased to announce two new members of its Board of Directors effective July 1: Jing Xiao of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and William D. Gropp of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Drs. Xiao and Gropp join the CRA Board this month with five other new CRA Board members elected in February. 

Jing Xiao joins the CRA Board of Directors in the place of Dez Song (Texas A&M University), who has stepped down to pursue a new appointment at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in Abu Dhabi. William D. Gropp joins the CRA Board of Directors as one of two IEEE-CS representatives, replacing Leila De Floriani (University of Maryland). CRA thanks the exiting board members for their service and contributions.

Jing Xiao

Jing Xiao is the Deans’ Excellence Professor, William B. Smith Distinguished Fellow, and Department Head of Robotics Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). 

She received her Ph.D. in Computer, Information, and Control Engineering from the University of Michigan, and previously served as a professor and Associate Dean of Research in the College of Computing and Informatics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research spans robotics, haptics, and intelligent systems. She is an IEEE Fellow and has served on the Administrative Committee of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS), including as the Vice President for Member Activities. She received the 2022 IEEE RAS George Saridis Leadership Award in Robotics and Automation.

William D. Gropp

William D. Gropp is Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and holds the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. 

He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1982 and worked at Yale University and Argonne National Laboratory. His research interests are in parallel computing, software for scientific computing, and numerical methods for partial differential equations. He is a Fellow of AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and SIAM and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and has received numerous awards for his work in HPC. He is also a member of CRA’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council and Executive Committee. 

Meet the entire distinguished group of leaders in computing research from leaders in computing research that serve that serve on the CRA Board of Directors at cra.org/about/board.