Professor Laura Dillon has been appointed Chairperson of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering for a term of two years. She just completed a two-year term as Interim Chairperson, which begin in September of 2003. Dillon was ppointed by Acting Dean Satish Udpa based on input from the Department faculty and the Department Advisory Committee.

In his announcement to the College of Engineering, Acting Dean Udpa writes "It has been a pleasure to work with Dr. Dillon during the past few weeks. I am looking forward to continue to work with her in advancing the mission and goals of the CSE Department and College. Please join me in thanking her for accepting this assignment."

During her time as Interim Chairperson, Professor Dillon has worked with faculty in CSE and around the campus to develop a strategic vision for computing and information at MSU. "Our future is exciting. It promises to be an eventful year--possibly an historic one. I look forward to working with our faculty to leverage the opportunities that lie ahead," says Dillon.

Professor Dillon joined MSU in 1997, coming from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her primary area of specialization, formal methods for the specification and validation of concurrent software systems, falls within the broad areas of programming languages and software engineering. Professor Dillon was recently re-elected to the ACM SIGSOFT (Special Interest Group in Software Engineering) Executive Board. She is currently an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, and previously served as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and as the area editor in Software Engineering for Communications of the ACM. She has been an ACM distinguished lecturer since 1995.