I am pleased to announce that the CS chair search committee has concluded its process and given an emphatic recommendation, derived from meetings with Faculty and their deliberations, to appoint Dr. Hamad Alizai who will therefore be the next chair of the Department of Computer Science. This appointment is for four years, from 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2027.

Our spirited colleague Dr. Hamad Alizai is a tenured Associate Professor and through his research, teaching and leadership has set very high standards for all of us to emulate.  As the Co-Principle Investigator at the National Center in Big Data and Cloud Computing (NCBC)’s Distributed Cloud Computing Lab, he specializes in edge computing and energy efficient internet-of-things technologies with applications for grids, computing networks, and domestic environments. Over the recent past, he has distinguished himself as an institution builder, breaking new grounds with consolidating the LUMS Learning Institute as its Director, responding to the ingress of artificial intelligence into higher education through targeted design of new programs and the multiple activities focused on learning, pedagogy and the seamless integration of technology into our teaching. In all these years, Dr. Hamad Alizai has impressed everyone with his passion and care for finesse.

Hamad: please accept my heartfelt thanks for accepting my invitation. We have great trust in your leadership, and you will always find us at your support.  

Furthermore, Dr. Basit Shafiq, Chair of Computer Science, has been a phenomenal colleague. He has led a diverse group of researchers and teachers and a large group of students in our most popular major, inside a highly complex environment, with sensibility, progressiveness and calculated adventurism. He will remain our most valuable treasure in the coming years for his astounding breadth of insights about higher education and the professional growth of the discipline of computer science. In him, we have our biggest champion for integrated learning and computational thinking permeating across all departments. I am sure Dr. Hamad Alizai will have a lot to learn from him. Thankyou Dr. Basit Shafiq and for all the personal academic sacrifices any chairperson has to give.

Finally, may I thank the CS search committee (Drs. Ijaz Naqvi, Mobin Javed and Zafar Qazi) for their diligence in guiding us ahead on this matter.

Muhammad Sabieh Anwar
Professor of Physics, Ahmed Dawood Chair and Dean
Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering