Announcements

We are delighted to welcome Dr. Afia Anjum and Dr. Shuteng Niu to the Department of Computer Science!

Dr. Afia Anjum specializes in cybersecurity, wireless communication, and AI for cyber-physical systems. Her research addresses critical challenges in securing next-generation communication systems, with a focus on AI-driven threat detection, secure semantic communication, and explainable AI. Her work has been published in leading venues including IEEE S&P, IEEE RTAS, PoPETs, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, and ECAI. She was also recognized as an IEEE Rising Star 2025 by the IEEE TCCN Special Interest Group on AI/ML in Security. Dr. Anjum maintains a Faculty Researcher affiliation with Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she has contributed to research projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Dr. Shuteng Niu focuses on artificial intelligence, machine learning, transfer learning, graph representation learning, and biomedical informatics. His research explores multimodal electronic health record modeling, reliable AI-driven drug discovery and repurposing, and learning from heterogeneous biomedical data. His long-term goal is to develop reliable, interpretable, and generalizable AI methods that accelerate drug discovery and advance precision healthcare. Before joining TCU, Dr. Niu conducted research in the Department of Artificial Intelligence and Informatics at Mayo Clinic and served as an Assistant Professor at Bowling Green State University.

Please join us in giving a warm welcome to Dr. Anjum and Dr. Niu as they begin their journey with our academic community!

This fall, TCU welcomes the inaugural cohort of its new Ph.D. in Computer Science — eight fully funded students working alongside faculty on research in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, software engineering, and applications across medicine, business, and the sciences. The program marks a milestone in the department’s growth and deepens the research opportunities available to undergraduates as well. Learn about the Ph.D. program.

We are delighted to welcome Dr. Chetraj Pandey and Dr. Kaiqun Fu to the Department of Computer Science!

Dr. Chetraj Pandey specializes in explainable AI, continual learning, and space weather forecasting. His doctoral research introduced novel solar flare prediction models and ensemble methods that integrate time series and image-based inputs. He also developed techniques for evaluating explanation consistency and localized predictions. Most recently, Dr. Pandey served as a Scientific Researcher with NASA’s Frontier Development Lab (FDL-X 2024), where he led the continual learning framework for DAGGER++ and supported the redevelopment of SHEATH, both operational pipelines for forecasting geomagnetic perturbations with real-time data.

Dr. Kaiqun Fu focuses on spatiotemporal data mining, graph neural networks (GNNs), machine learning, and GeoAI, with wide-ranging applications in transportation systems, power systems, social media mining, and urban safety. His research has been supported by more than $1.7 million in competitive funding, including NSF CISE: CRII and TIP: ITE awards as PI, along with collaborative NSF and NASA projects. He has published extensively in top venues such as AAAI, IJCAI, ACM SIGSPATIAL, IEEE BigData, and ACM Computing Surveys, advancing fields such as traffic incident forecasting, social event detection, urban safety modeling, and physics-informed ML.

Please join us in giving a warm welcome to Dr. Pandey and Dr. Fu as they begin their journey with our academic community!