I am a Foundation Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) and served as the Chair of the CSE Department from 2013 to 2018. I am also founder/director of the UNR Computer Vision Laboratory (CVL) and a Senior Personnel of the NSF AI Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning (IFML). My research interests include Computer Vision, Medical Imaging, and Machine/Deep Learning. My research has been funded both by government and industry agencies including NSF, NIFA, ONR, NASA, NIJ, NDoT, Ford Motor Company, and Honda. According to Google Scholar, I have an h-index of 58 and 15554 citations (as of 10/11/2025. I have served as a panelist for the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Defense and NASA. I am also Associate Editor of the Machine Vision and Applications Journal and founder of the International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC) and the International Symposium of Mathematical and Computational Oncology (ISMCO).
Duane Moser
I have conducted scientific research mostly focused on aquatic or underground environments on the U.S. Great Lakes and inland waters in Wisconsin and Washington State, North Atlantic, Southern Ocean, the Antarctic Dry Valleys and the deep subsurface in South Africa, Canada, and the United States. The underground work employs mines, natural caves, and boreholes from surface. I have published over 90 peer-reviewed papers, have appeared in the scientific and popular press many times and have numerous technical reports, white papers, and other works. My work has been cited over 7,700 times, with an h-index of 39 and i10-index of 63 (02/26/2026). Currently, my work focuses on life in extreme environments, astrobiology, emerging contaminants, using environmental DNA as a conservation tool, and molecular archaeology.
I have been an associate professor in the Division of Hydrologic Sciences at Desert Research Institute since 2017. Prior to that I was an associate or assistant professor in the Division of Earth and Ecosystems Sciences at DRI (appointed in 2005). I am adjunct professor in the UNLV School of Life Sciences, Department of Geosciences, and Water Resources Management. I did postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University in Geosciences and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. I obtained a Ph.D. (With Distinction) in Limnology and Oceanography from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and the Center for Great Lakes Studies and M.S. and B.S. degrees in Microbiology from the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh and an associates degree in Reclamation/Geology from the University of Wisconsin, Platteville.
Azimrh Zare Harofteh
Dr. Zare Harofteh's research spans both fundamental and applied topics, including the development of air quality prediction models, atmospheric chemistry (such as the evolution of chemical composition in wildfire plumes), fire process modeling, fire-atmosphere interactions, and environmental justice in terms of air pollution exposure. She utilizes a combination of field data, remote sensing, modeling, and machine learning techniques in her work. Before joining DRI, she spent five years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and the EPA Research Office. In these positions, she developed, evaluated, and integrated gas- and aerosol-phase chemical mechanisms into atmospheric chemical transport models, which have been applied in studies such as assessing the impact of emission reduction policies on atmospheric chemistry. Her other research interests include the interactions between biogenic emissions, air quality, and climate change, which she explored during her PhD research at Aarhus University in Denmark.
Dr. Zare Harofteh also holds a faculty appointment with the Atmospheric Science Graduate Program at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she contributes to teaching and mentoring students.
Hiroshi Sawada
My research interests encompass experimental investigations of High Energy Density (HED) Science, particularly focusing on short pulse laser-solid interactions, relativistic electron generation, hard x-ray generation, and fast electron transport, all of which are relevant to laser fusion schemes such as Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) and Fast Ignition (FI). The plasma conditions created by high-power lasers are expected to reach temperatures in the millions of degrees and densities above that of solid matter. I am particularly interested in using x-ray diagnostics (including x-ray spectroscopy, absorption spectroscopy, and x-ray imaging) to investigate these plasmas. This approach aids in understanding complex physical phenomena like the equation of state, phase transitions, radiation transport, shock wave heating, and compression in states of matter known as warm dense matter. Additionally, I am interested in the physics of charged particles generated by high-power, short-pulse lasers. The characterization and potential applications of these relativistic particles are also central to my research interests.
Philippe Vidon
Executive Director for the Division of Earth and Ecosystem Sciences
Philippe obtained his PhD in Geography from York University, ON, Canada in 2004, and subsequently occupied professor positions at Indiana University – Purdue University in Indianapolis (IUPUI) and at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry a.k.a. ESF, in Syracuse, NY. There he served as Director of the Hydrological Systems Science Council, among other leadership appointments. His most recent research has focused on a broad range of topics including (but not limited to): watershed management, water quality, soil biogeochemistry (e.g., N, P, C, Hg cycling and soil N2O, CO2, and CH4 emissions), bioenergy, and the impact of beaver dam analogues on floodplain hydrogeomorphology and landscape resiliency.
Kathleen Rodrigues
Kathleen is a Quaternary geochronologist that specializes in radiation exposure dating techniques including optically stimulated luminescence, thermally stimulated luminescence and electron spin resonance. Her research interests are focused on the development and application of luminescence dating methods to address questions in Quaternary geomorphology, paleoclimatology, and archaeology. Her recent work has focused primarily on the development of novel methods for dating eruption events in the Great Basin and defining the timescales over which tephra reworking occurs in the landscape.
David Leitner
My current research interests include theoretical and computational studies of energy flow in molecules, particularly in biological systems, and its influence on chemical reaction kinetics and thermal transport. Other research interests include theoretical approaches to address thermal conduction in nanoscale systems, and computational studies of terahertz spectroscopy and dynamics of solvated biomolecules.
Natia Frank
Prof. Natia L. Frank received her Bachelor’s degree with Honors from Bard College in 1987 (Chemistry, Math, Music), an M.Sc. in Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1989), and Ph.D at the University of California-San Diego (1996, Organic Chemistry). She was a CNRS Postdoctoral Fellow with the late Prof. Olivier Kahn at the University of Bordeaux, France (spin-based materials), and an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow (Biomaterials, Prof. Thomas Meade/Prof. Harry Gray) at Caltech. She began her independent career in 2000 as an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington-Seattle in the study of multifunctional magnetic materials for spintronics and biosensing. In 2005, she was recruited as a Canada Research Chair Tier II in Multifunctional Materials Chemistry at the University of Victoria where she developed optically switchable spin-based qubits for quantum science. In 2012, she was a Visiting Scholar at Humbolt University (Physics), Berlin, Germany, and University of Rennes (Chemistry), France. In 2020, she joined the University of Nevada-Reno as Associate Professor of Chemistry. Her primary expertise is at the interface of organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, spin-based materials and photochemistry/electron transfer theory which allows her to be well-situated to address current challenges in molecular quantum information science: the design of molecular qubits with long decoherence times, multiqubit arrays, and qubits/qudits that can respond to external stimuli for quantum computing and sensing. Prof. Frank currently serves on two funded DOE EFRC advisory boards in quantum science, the ACS-PRF Advisory Board, and has served on numerous NSF funding panels in quantum relevant areas.
Nicholas Borotto
My research program strives to improve mass spectrometric-based detection and analysis of biomolecules. In particular, we pair mass spectrometry with chemical derivatization, photon irradiation, ion mobility, and radical chemistry to elucidate the three-dimensional structure of proteins, better characterize the acidic and hydrophobic proteome, detect and localize post-translational modifications. Centered at the interface of chemistry and biology, my research program provides students with the opportunity to tackle both biochemically-focused projects and biophysical questions at the core of the techniques themselves. Currently, my group is recruiting students for three projects:
1) Equipping a carbon monoxide laser to a mass spectrometer, characterizing the behavior of irradiated biomolecules, and applying infrared multiphoton dissociation (IRMPD) to instruments and at pressure regimes traditionally precluded from this technique.
2) Probing protein three-dimensional structure with photocaged small molecule reagents both in vitro and in vivo and demonstrating the utility of the temporal and spatial control that is provided by these probes.
3) Applying the tandem mass spectrometry technique free-radical initiated peptide sequencing (FRIPS) to complex mixtures of anions.
Shamik Sengupta
Dr. Shamik Sengupta is the Executive Director of the Cybersecurity Center at University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) and a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. His research emphasizes on various cybersecurity issues such as vulnerability assessment and malware analysis, security and privacy in cybersecurity information exchange, anomaly detection in cyber-physical systems, machine Learning, network security, honeypot as well as cognitive radio and DSA networks, game theory, network economics and self-configuring wireless mesh networks. He has authored over 150 international conferences and journal publications including IEEE GLOBECOM 2008 best paper award, International Symposium on Performance Evaluation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (SPECTS) 2017 best paper award and IEEE CCWC 2020 best paper award. He is the recipient of NSF CAREER award in 2012; UNR CSE Best Researcher award in 2015-2016 and 2017-2018; UNR College of Engineering Excellence Award 2018; University of Central Florida CECS Distinguished Alumni Honor award (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering) 2018; and the UNR Ralph E. & Rose A. Hoeper Professorship Award 2019. For more information, please visit: https://www.cse.unr.edu/~shamik/.