CSE Alumni Board Members

Board President Lindsey Fowler (DeSalvo)

Position: Technical Program Manager, Amazon
City of Residence: Seattle, WA
Education: BS Computer Science, UC San Diego 2005

Lindsey started at Amazon.com in the Content Management group as a Software Development Engineer the week after graduating UCSD. Her passion was always software user experience, and after a year, she moved into a Technical Program Manager role. She drove the day-to-day delivery of the engineering staff, and was instrumental in the strategic direction of Amazon's internal content management user interface and optimization system. In 2009, she took on program management for Amazon's Personalization team as well. Lindsey is now a Technical Program Manager for the Delivery Customer Experience team, responsible for projects effecting Amazon's Super Saver Shipping program. She lives with her husband and two cats in their Seattle, Washington home where she enjoys gardening, reading her Kindle, and watching Anime.

General Members

Haytham Allos

Position: Software Architect, Independent Consultant
City of Residence: San Diego
Education: MS Rady School, UC San Diego 2006; BS Computer Science, UC San Diego 1996

Haytham is a visionary and experienced executive with deep knowledge in the enterprise software application development and architecture. He has over 15 years of business and technology experience. He is highly regarded as a key resource, critical thinker and out-of-the-box problem solver by senior executive customers. Haytham has successfully partnered with many global customers such as Pfizer Inc., Sony, Hewlett-Packard Company, General Motors Corporation and various government agencies. Working closely with customers, he led many strategic transformations of technology and business management while keeping a financial management mindset. Haytham is known for his ability to create and articulate corporate vision while working closely with cross-functional teams to embrace it.

Erik Buchanan

Position: Software Engineer, Google
City of Residence: Southern California
Education: BS & MS Computer Science, UC San Diego

Erik Buchanan received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from UC San Diego in 2007, and continued at UCSD in the 5-Year Masters program. He specialized in security research in the Systems and Networking group of the Computer Science and Engineering Department. During his time at UCSD Erik interned at companies like Microsoft, Google and Intuit. He spent two years continuing research in the Websense Security Labs in San Diego. Erik now works on Analytics at Google.

Taner Halicioglu

Position:Technical Consultant
City of Residence: San Juan Capistrano, CA
Education: BS Computer Science, UC San Diego 1996

After graduating UCSD, Taner moved back to the Bay Area and was an early-hire at a web hosting start-up (called "Internet Systems, Inc", at the time) doing system and network administration, as well as tools engineering. Following ISI, he was an early-hire at another startup, Loudcloud and is now part of HP. In 2002, he started work at eBay, concentrating on monitoring and tools. In October 2004, he decided to leave eBay for an unknown startup called "TheFacebook" - which at the time appeared to be "just another social network, but only for college students". In December 2009, he left the Bay Area (and Facebook) to move down to Orange County to work for Blizzard Entertainment (the game company) as the Lead Reliability Engineer for the new-and-improved Battle.net service. In December of 2011, he left Blizzard to pursue consulting and advisory opportunities.

Tiffany Liu

Position: Engineer SPAWAR
City of Residence: San Diego, CA
Education: BS Computer Science, UC San Diego 2007

After graduating from UCSD, Tiffany joined the SPAWAR System Center New Professionals program, a two year professional development program for scientist and engineers, in San Diego. During the program, she toured with a user design group and a data strategy group, taking a permanent assignment as a SOA software engineer with the data strategy group. She is also the New Professionals Steering Committee member, New Professionals Web Chairperson and a SPAWAR recruiter. Outside of work, she is working on running a full marathon, having already finished two half marathons. She also does yoga, bhangra and ceramics. She loves trying new activities with an open mind and heart!

Nilofer Motiwala

Position: Software Engineer, Google (Video/YouTube)
City of Residence: San Francisco
Education: MS Computer Science, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison 2002; BS Computer Science, UC San Diego 2000

Nilofer joined UCSD's Eleanor Roosevelt College as an International student in the major in Third World Studies. After taking CSE 9A,B & 12, she decided to switch her major to Computer Science. She went on to get her Masters at University of Wisconsin, Madison and enjoyed research in Kernel optimizations and Database Systems. She has held positions with Siebel, Qualcomm and is currently at Google. In her current project with the Video team, she is leading the frontend team; driving decisions in technology, design and implementation.

Nilofer lives in San Francisco and in her spare time enjoys writing restaurant reviews (after she is done with reading email :)

Michele Strout

Position: Assistant Professor, Colorado State University
City of Residence: Boulder, CO
Education: PhD Computer Science UC San Diego 2003; MS Computer Science UC San Diego 1999; BS Computer Science UC San Diego 1997

Michelle has been an assistant professor in the computer science department at Colorado State University since August 2005. From August 2003 through June 2003, she was an Enrico Fermi Postdoctoral Scholar at Argonne National Laboratory and a Research Associate at the University of Chicago. Her main research area is high performance computing and her research interests include compilers and run-time systems, scientific computing, and software engineering.

In 2008, Michelle received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation for her research in parallelization techniques for irregular applications, such as molecular dynamics simulations. In 2010, she received a DOE Early Career award to fund her research in separating the specification of scientific computing applications from the specification of implementation details such as how to parallelize such computations. Michelle lives with her husband and two boys ages 5 and 9 in beautiful Fort Collins, Colorado. She enjoys her main "hobbies" who are two boys ages 5 and 9. =)

Deborah Vieira

Position: Software Consultant
City of Residence: Bay Area
Education: BS Computer Science, UC San Diego

Deborah consults with companies in technology strategy, both for consumer products and enterprise solutions. After working as a software engineer for a few years, she transitioned into a consulting role for consumer and enterprise product companies in Australia and the Philippines, in both product development and operations roles. After returning to the US, she consulted domestically with F500 companies on product design and user experience, liaising between business and technology groups. Most recently, she built and managed the technology team for frog design in San Francisco, and consulted with clients on technology decisions.

David Zhang

Position: Software Development Engineer in Test, Microsoft (Windows Azure)
City of Residence: Seattle, WA
Education: BS Computer Science, UC San Diego 2008

After graduating from UCSD, David accepted a position with Microsoft as a Software Engineer in Test in the Identity and Security Division. After contributing and leading the testing efforts for several projects, he moved to the Cloud Networking Team in Windows Azure to pursue his passions in networking and virtualization. Outside of work, he participates in a competitive skydiving team, enjoys paragliding & skiing, and works on finding the perfect cup of coffee.

Jennifer Arguello

Position: Product Manager, Mozilla
City of Resident: San Francisco
Education: BS Computer Science, UC San Diego 2000

Jennifer went to work for an open source database company after graduation. Three start up companies and 6 years later she was part of an acquisition by Microsoft where she has been almost 5 years. Currently she is working on voice recognition for the Xbox Kinect. Her unofficial second job is doing community service, mostly working with K – 12 students to get them excited about STEM fields. Aside from her professional and community service activities, you can find Jennifer out in nature or on a sports field.

Eric Tune

Position: Staff Software Engineer, Google
City of Residence: Saratoga, CA
Education: PhD Computer Science, UC San Diego 2004, BS Computer Engineering, UC San Diego 1996

After receiving his BS from UC San Diego in 1996, Eric worked at NIS in San Diego on machine vision applications. He then returned to UC San Diego in 1998 as an MS student, hoping to pursue a long-time interest in computer architecture. A great experience as a Research Assistant in the Computer Architecture Lab convinced him to stay for a PhD, with a focus on computer architecture. After receiving his PhD in 2004, Eric took a leap of faith and joined Google, with little idea what he would be working on. He is now a Tech Lead on Google's cluster scheduling system, where his interest in computer architecture is put to good use. He lives with his wife in Saratoga, California. He enjoys surfing and woodworking in his spare time.

Khawja Shams

Full Name: Khawaja Shams
Graduation Year: 2006
Current Location: Pasadena, CA
Current Position and Company: Software Engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Khawaja Shams is a Software Engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he leads the development of server side applications for Mars Science Laboratory’s Activity Planning and Sequencing Subsystem. He serves on the CIO Technology Advisory Board at JPL, and he is also a co-chair of Cloud Computing Working Group at JPL. Khawaja is on the NIST board to define an architecture for cloud computing for the federal government. He is leading numerous cloud computing efforts across NASA. Khawaja is an prolific speaker, and he gives dozens of highly rated and attended talks each year. Khawaja works with multiple NASA centers as well as numerous federal agencies. Prior to joining JPL, Khawaja worked at Nokia Mobile Phones in the Internet Protocol team and Malin Space Science Systems. Khawaja earned a B.S. in Computer Science from UCSD, a Masters from Cornell University, and he is currently pursuing a PhD in robotics at University of Southern California under Dr. Maja Mataric. Khawaja’s research interests include robotics, distributed systems, cyber security, and immersive visualization.

Garo Bournoutian

Position: Engineer, Qualcomm
City of Residence: San Diego
Education: PhD Computer Engineering, UC San Diego 2011; MS Computer Engineering, UC San Diego 2007; BS Computer Engineering, UC San Diego 2005; BS Cognitive Neuroscience, UC San Diego 2005

Garo Bournoutian received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from UC San Diego in 2005, and continued at UCSD in the PhD program. He specialized in computer architecture and mobile embedded process design in the ART (Architecture, Reliability, and Testing) group of the Computer Science and Engineering Department. During his time at UCSD, Garo worked at Scripps Institute of Oceanography developing embedded underwater robotics software, and at Qualcomm architecting custom cycle-accurate application processor models. He is currently working at Qualcomm in the emulation design automation group. Outside of work, he enjoys hiking, coding, recreational flying, and Rock Band.