Research

Computer Science Research

We are a department with very high research activity housed in a liberal arts institution. Like a large research university, our faculty and their Ph.D. students are actively engaged in research, with undergraduate and master's students encouraged to participate.

Several faculty members and students participate in joint research activities with two nearby national research facilities: the NASA Langley Research Center (NASA LaRC) and the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab).

Here's how to get started with research as an undergraduate.

Research Areas

Computer Science faculty research belongs in one or more of the areas listed below. To learn more about each faculty members research, check out their profiles on our Faculty page. 

Table lists the different areas of research within Computer Science at William & Mary and the faculty members who are active in those categories

AI/ML & Data Mining	Computer Architecture	Graphics & Visualization
• Ashley Gao • Robert Michael Lewis • Qun Li • Sidi Lu • Jie Ren • Huajie Shao • Janice Zhang • Yanfu Zhang	• Dmitry Evtyushkin • Bin Ren • Evgenia Smirni • Yifan Sun	• Tim Davis • Sidi Lu • Pieter Peers • Yifan Sun • Janice Zhang
High Performance & Scientific Computing	Human-Computer Interaction	Security & Privacy
• Bin Ren • Evgenia Smirni • Andreas Stathopoulos • Yifan Sun	• Yifan Sun • Janice Zhang • Gang Zhou	• Dmitry Evtyushkin • Stephen Herwig • Qun Li • Adwait Nadkarni
Software Engineering	Systems & Networking	Theory
• Oscar Chaparro • Denys Poshyvanyk • Antonio Mastropaolo	• Jim Deverick • Peter Kemper • Qun Li • Sidi Lu • Evgenia Smirni • Yifan Sun • Gang Zhou	• Robert Michael Lewis • Weizhen Mao

Research Funding

 Computer Science research is funded by numerous external grants or gifts from agencies such as:

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF)
The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
The Virginia Space Grant Consortium (VSGC)
The Jeffress Memorial Trust of Virginia
Coastal Virginia Center for Cyber Innovation (COVA CCI)
Industry sponsors (Accenture, Activision, AMD, Cisco, Google, etc.)

Research Impact

 We publish in top peer-reviewed journals and conferences in our respective fields. Here is a list of research dissertations and theses written by our graduate (Ph.D. and MS) and undergraduate students.  

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects 
Undergraduate Honor Theses

Computing Resources

At a university level, W&M supports a cluster computer for computationally-intensive work. The Department of Computer Science has its own Computing Resources.