NSF names new CISE assistant director

The National Science Foundation has named Jeannette Wing, president's professor and head of the Computer Science Department in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, assistant director for Computer amd Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at NSF. She will begin her new position July 1.

Wing will guide and manage funding for NSF, which supports research in computer and information science and engineering. With a budget of $527 million, CISE provides 86 percent of all federally funded research in computer science.

Wing has been in charge of Carnegie Mellon's Computer Science Department since 2004.

In research, she is an international leader in the area of formal methods -- the use of mathematical models and logics to specify and reason about computing systems. Since 2001, she has directed Carnegie Mellon's Specification and Verification Center, which conducts research in new advances in formal methods and their applications to safety- and mission-critical systems.

More recently, she has turned her attention to trustworthy computing with a focus on software security.