New Faculty Member Joins CMS

The department is excited to announce that Ashwin Rajadesingan has joined the department faculty as a new tenure-track Assistant Professor. Rajadesingan earned a Bachelor of Technology degree in Computer Science from VIT University in India, a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from Arizona State University, and a Ph.D. in Information from the University of Michigan (completed this past summer). He comes to us as part of the college-wide search last year to hire in the growing area of computational communication.

As Dr. Rajadesingan puts it: “I come to Moody College after a few detours. I have undergraduate and master's degrees in computer science and worked for a couple of years at a tech startup before getting my Ph.D. in information. Drawing on my interdisciplinary background, I perform large-scale computational analyses and conduct qualitative design interviews on how, when and why people talk about politics on social media. My research is around how we can design online discussion spaces and fun party games to support a vibrant, deliberative democracy.”

Rajadesingan will be teaching courses primarily related to computational communication and political communication. As he explains, “I enjoy teaching those seemingly "technical" programming courses. Too often programming is considered technical and complex. My goal in the classroom is to make it accessible to everyone and help students see through that myth. I aim to mentor students to develop coding and problem-solving skills for a career beyond the classroom.”

Rajadesingan’s office will be in CMA 7.116B and he can be reached via email at arajades@austin.utexas.edu. Welcome Ashwin!

-Portions of this article were written by Mary Huber