Announcement for Position of YWCC Associate Dean of Research

Dear YWCC Faculty, Lecturers, and Staff,

I am writing to share that Dr. Grace Wang will begin a sabbatical during the 2026-2027 academic year at Princeton University. A Distinguished Professor, Founding Director of the Center for AI Research, and an IEEE Fellow, Grace has served the college with distinction as Associate Dean of Research and External Relations. We are deeply grateful to her for that service and for the many contributions she has made to YWCC.

Grace has strengthened YWCC’s research community and infrastructure in lasting ways. She established a series of assistant professor roundtables to help faculty develop competitive grant proposals, and created a college-level process for administering professional-development funds that support faculty and lecturers in advancing their scholarly and professional work. She launched a PhD Forum to build community around research excellence, foster collaboration, and strengthen students’ research communication and dissemination skills. Through a monthly newsletter, she keeps the community informed of funding opportunities and celebrates our faculty’s submissions and awards—and she personally reviews every proposal summary and budget across the college, both to support her colleagues and to identify new opportunities for collaboration.

Grace has also represented YWCC at numerous events, giving presentations to potential donors, industry partners, and government officials, raising the visibility of both individual faculty research and our college’s collective expertise, and contributing to NJIT’s fundraising efforts, including helping secure philanthropic support for the university.

Grace’s leadership extends well beyond our campus. She serves as the sole academic representative on the New Jersey Supreme Court Committee on Artificial Intelligence and the Courts, as the only university representative on the New Jersey Governor’s AI Task Force Innovation Group, and as a member of the New Jersey Supreme Court Advisory Committee on Access and Fairness. She is an editor for premier journals including ACM Computing Surveys, and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, She has also served as General Chair and Program Chair for leading AI conferences, including the ACM International Conference on AI in Finance.

Please join me in thanking Grace for her leadership and her commitment to supporting the success of our faculty and the broader research enterprise. We wish her a productive and rewarding sabbatical.

Effective July 1, Dr. David A. Bader will serve as YWCC Associate Dean of Research. As many of you know, David is a Distinguished Professor of Data Science and founding director of NJIT’s Institute for Data Science, and an internationally recognized leader in high-performance computing, data science, and computational science. He is an elected member of the Board of the Computing Research Association and a Fellow of IEEE, ACM, AAAS, and SIAM. His many honors include the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award, induction into the University of Maryland’s Innovation Hall of Fame, and recognition by HPCwire as one of its “35 Legends.” He is also an outstanding communicator of computing research and frequently represents NJIT in prominent media outlets, including The New York Times and CNN.

David’s research leadership, national visibility, and skill in communicating the importance of computing research will be tremendous assets to YWCC in this role. He looks forward to supporting faculty in developing competitive research grant proposals, enhancing the visibility of the research our faculty lead, and enhancing our college’s research portfolio.

Please join me in congratulating David on this new role. I’m confident you’ll find in him an energetic collaborator and a strong advocate for our research community.

Best,
Jamie Payton
Dean, Ying Wu College of Computing