Research Professors

Prof. Philip de Melo

Philip de Melo holds a Ph.D. in mathematics and computer science. He was a faculty member at Columbia University and Georgia Tech as well as a UNESCO professor.

He also worked for a number of years in the US government research labs. His research interests include: advanced methods in applied mathematics, optimization theory, signal data processing, artificial intelligence, machine learning,  big data, business intelligence, automated decision management, and data warehousing.

He authored and co-authored over 80 papers published in peer reviewed journals,  4 books, and 2 patents. He served as a PI for research projects funded by ONR, AFOSR, NSF, USDA, and industrial consortia.

Currently, he is working on the development of intelligent agents with the decision-making capacities to process big data for business and medical applications. 

Dr. Benjamin Harvey

Dr. Benjamin Harvey currently serves as the Director of Data Science for Maxar Technologies a Federal Space and Defense Contractor where he leads all data science pursuits for the company including implementing the internal data science ecosystem.  Dr. Harvey also serves as a Sr. Research Faculty at Johns Hopkins University within the Bloomberg School of Public Health in the Biostatistics Department.   Dr. Harvey also teaches Data Science and Big Data Analytics courses at George Washington University in the Department of Engineering and Department of Computer Science’s joint Data Analytics program. 

Before joining Maxar, he was a lead data scientist and solutions architect with Databricks where he led data science and machine learning activities in the federal government, intelligence community, and Health and Life Sciences (HLS) field engineering organizations. Prior to Databricks, Dr. Harvey joined the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2009 and worked there for over a decade where his final position was the Chief of Operations Data Science. 

He was hired into the cryptologic Computer Science Develop Program (CDP), graduated from the CDP in 2012 and was the first African American to be accepted and to finish the program. Dr. Harvey also conducted research at Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) in the Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics (BIG) program in 2008. He was a bioinformatics post-graduate research fellow in 2009 with i2b2, National Center for Biomedical Computing, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Children’s Hospital Boston Informatics Program (CHIP). He also completed a Clinical Informatics Research-Fellowship in 2010 at the National Institute of Health (NIH), Clinical Center within the Department of Clinical Research Informatics (DCRI). 

Dr. Harvey graduated from Mississippi Valley State University (MVSU) in 2008 with a B.S. in Pre-Medicine & Computer Science. He received a Master of Science in Computer Science from Bowie State University in 2011 and Doctor of Science in Computer Science from Bowie State University (BSU) in 2015. His dissertation was entitled “Cloud Scale Genomic Signals Processing for Robust Microarray Data Analysis” and was advised by Dr. Soo-Yeon Ji and Dr. Vince Carey, Harvard Professor.  He also holds a Cryptologic Computer Science Certificate from the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) from a dual NSA program with the Naval Post-Graduate School (NPS).

Dr. Soo Yong Kim

Dr. Kim has been working on various aspects of theoretical physics, from mathematical physics to complex phenomena at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He holds a PhD in Physics (1985) from Columbia University. Since 1984, he joined the team of Space Science and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) of the Princeton University as a post-doctoral fellow, and he later continued his career track back in the home country, South Korea at KAIST serving as an assistant, associate, and full professor from 1986 to 2018, and still supports as an emeritus faculty member. After his initial interests in nonlinear physics, rigorous statistical mechanics and numerical techniques in supercomputer, he worked on fundamental mathematical analysis in the area of human brain function, computer vision, complexity and AI technique into socio and financial data.

Since the mid-1990s, he has had an opportunity to contribute to a nationwide STEM education strategy initiative, which developed into a passion to support many secondary school curriculum and college freshman-level science and math courses for younger students/scientists which led to academic awards for his dedication and excellence. As one of his successes, he has led a team of experts in South Korea and collaborated with NASA Museum Alliance to design a curriculum specific for Korean students and translated NASA’s educational materials/contents specific to Environment Science topics into Korean version, as a STEM content.

He authored and co-authored more than 150 papers published in peer reviewed journals. Lately, he has been interested in mathematics of quantum computing.