March 1999

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IT&E Has Two New Chairs The School of Information Technology and Engineering has named two new chairs: Andre Manitius in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Sushil Jajodia in the Department of Information and Software Engineering. Manitius joined Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1988 and became its chair last year. Jajodia took the helm of the Information and Software Engineering in September of last year. The university's ability to respond to the region's needs for a highly trained workforce is a priority for both chairs. Northern Virginia has a high demand for electrical and computer engineers, and Manitius is determined to capitalize on this demand. To sweeten the deal for potential students and to better serve the area's industry, Manitius, in cooperation with faculty members in his department, is modifying old degree programs and creating new ones that prepare graduates for jobs. Having finalized efforts to establish a B.S. and an M.S. in computer engineering, Manitius is working with his faculty to obtain approval from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia for a Ph.D. program in electrical and computer engineering. And thanks to a half-million-dollar grant from a public/ private consortium, the Electrical and Computer Engineering has yet another carrot to proffer to potential students. The grant provides start-up funds for an instructional lab in microelectronics, another hot field in Northern Virginia. "One of the fundamental goals of our department is to respond to the region's need for information technology graduates," says Jajodia. "Companies simply cannot find graduates who are trained in information technology, so we have to make sure that we respond to this need." Jajodia is pleased with the overall direction of his department. The master's degree programs in information systems and software engineering, as well as the three graduate certificates in information engineering, software engineering, and information systems security, are very popular, he says. "We also pride ourselves on our research record and reputation." "At the same time, there are newer things that we ought to be thinking about," says Jajodia. "We need to continue to recruit world-class faculty members to expand our existing programs and develop new initiatives." Software engineering management, secure electronic commerce, and data mining are all areas in which initiatives might be created, he says. Manitius received his Ph.D. degree from the Polytechnical University of Warsaw, Poland, where he later worked as a junior faculty member. He worked for a few years as a professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and spent a year at the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C. In 1991, he received the American Mathematical Society's Citation for Public Service, related to his work at the National Science Foundation. Jajodia is director of Mason's Center for Secure Information Systems, the first university-based center in the United States dedicated solely to the security of information systems. Before coming to Mason, Jajodia was director of the Database and Expert Systems Program at the National Science Foundation. He has also served as head of the Database and Distributed Systems Section at the Naval Research Laboratory, and as associate professor of computer science at the University of Missouri at Columbia. He has published more than 200 technical papers and edited 12 books. In 1996, he received the Kristian Beckman award from the International Federation for Information Processing's Technical Committee 11 for his contributions to the discipline of information security, and he is one of the founding editors-in-chief of the Journal of Computer Security.