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Research
Summer Research Opportunities
Each summer the faculty organize a number of research projects which are open to students. Applications from both HMCers and off-campus students are considered.
The process of assigning students to summer research projects begins when students complete an application indicating their interests. Faculty then meet and assign students to each project. One spring colloquium session each year is devoted to presentations of upcoming summer research projects.
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Computer Science research project descriptions and applications are available at the
HMC campus-wide Undergraduate Research Opportunities (URO) page.Important Dates:
- Monday, February 1 at 6:00am - First day to apply for projects
- Sunday, February 21 at 11:59pm - Last day to apply for projects
- We also maintain a list of extra-departmental opportunities...
Research Overview
Each faculty member in the department has an active research program that involves undergraduates. A substantial portion of this research is funded by the National Science Foundation. The department currently has several active NSF grants, and additional research support comes from sources including the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the Mellon Foundation, and the Baker and Rose-Hills Foundations. We thank all of these sources for making summer research at HMC possible!
During the summer, a subset of the HMC CS faculty advise research projects and operate an NSF REU Site. Although not every faculty member advises a project every summer, our research "homebase," the second floor of Sprague when on campus, or our virtual research community when remote, is a bustling place (we supported over 70 students in 2019 and over 50 students in 2020). Below is a general list of faculty research interests.
Faculty Research Interests
- Professor Lucas Bang: Quantitative Program Analysis
- Professor Jim Boerkoel: Human-Robot Teams, Scheduling and Planning, Artificial Intelligence
- Professor Katherine Breeden: Computer Graphics, Human Gaze Response, Computational Geometry
- Professor Zach Dodds: Robot Vision and Spatial Reasoning, CS Outreach
- Professor Robert Keller: Intelligent Music Software
- Professor Geoff Kuenning: Operating Systems and Mobile Computing
- Professor Colleen Lewis: Computer Science Education
- Professor Ran Libeskind-Hadas: Algorithmic Computational Biology
- Professor Julie Medero: Natural Language Processing, especially its applications to literacy education
- Professor George Montanez: Machine Learning and why it works!
- Professor Melissa O'Neill: Parallel and Distributed Systems and Programming Languages
- Professor Xanda Schofield: Natural Language Processing
- Professor Chris Stone: Types in Programming Languages and Compilers
- Professor Elizabeth Sweedyk: Educational Computer Games
- Professor Erin Talvitie: Machine Learning
- Professor Beth Trushkowsky: Crowdsourcing and Databases
- Professor Ben Wiedermann: Programming Languages and improving the Human/Program Interface
- Professor Yi-Chieh (Jessica) Wu: Computational Biology
REU
The NSF's Research Experience for Undergraduates programs, or REUs, are funded by the National Science Foundation and support undergraduate research in many academic areas. The HMC CISE REU is open both to Harvey Mudd students, Claremont Colleges students, and students from other schools. The NSF requires that student participants be U.S. citizens or permanent residents who have not completed their undergraduate studies.
School Year Research Opportunities
Students can engage in research during the academic year by finding a research mentor and registering for CS 185/186.