School Welcomes Three New Faculty Members
Aaron Boothroyd, after teaching for several years as an Adjunct Professor in the New Media Program, is teaching this year full-time as a Lecturer. He holds a BA in New Media and an MA in interdisciplinary studies. He has been teaching at UMaine for eleven years, instructing courses on digital art, animation, filmmaking, and 3-D modeling. Aaron has also worked with Maine Media in Camden, the Maine Film Association in Portland, and as a professional photographer and videographer for the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor. As a freelancer, he has produced professional content for clients such as Google, PepsiCo, NPR, CPTV, and MPBN. He owns and operates Levelbest, a production company that specializes in game design, documentary film, and online content.
Chris Dufour is a full-time Lecturer in the School of Computing and Information Science. He is from northern Maine and now lives the Bangor area. As a former graduate student and teaching assistant at UMaine, Chris enjoys providing one-on-one support to students new to both college and coding. His research area is High Performance Computing, focusing on improving parallel computing performance. Chris plans to develop new active learning strategies that will be incorporated into software development classes at the University of Maine.
Salimeh Yasaei Sekeh is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science. Prior to UMaine, she was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has also held appointments in Brazil and Italy. She received her Ph.D. in inferential Statistics from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran in 2013. Salimeh’s research focuses on designing and analyzing machine learning algorithms, developing theory and algorithms for data analysis, applications of machine learning approaches in real-time problems, deep learning techniques, data mining, pattern recognition, and network structure learning with applications in biology.