Title with Advance at UNM:

Leadership team member

Your background in academia:

Melanie E. Moses is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico and an External Faculty Member at the Santa Fe Institute. She earned a B.S. from Stanford University in Symbolic Systems and a Ph.D. in Biology from UNM. Her interdisciplinary research crosses the boundaries of Computer Science and Biology by modeling search processes in complex adaptive systems such as ant colonies and immune systems. She uses bio-inspired design of swarms of robots to autonomously cooperate and adapt to environmental conditions, currently focused on monitoring the gas emissions from volcanoes. She has mentored dozens of graduate and undergraduate students and led projects including NM CSforAll, the NASA Swarmathon, and the Google ExploreCSR Swarmathon:TNG to engage thousands of women and other underrepresented students in computer science from high school through graduate school. She co-founded the UNM-SFI Working Group on Algorithmic Justice and is on the leadership team of the Advance at UNM program to support the success of women faculty in STEM. She currently serves on the board of the Computing Research Association’s Widening Participation program. She is a Special Advisor to the UNM Vice President for Research for Artificial Intelligence and the Chair of the New Mexico AI Consortium.

Research in the Moses Lab focuses on computational modeling of complex biological systems, particularly on cooperative search strategies in immune systems and ant colonies. Her research also applies principles from biology to design computational systems, particularly robotic swarms that replicate ant behaviors to perform collective tasks. Her research lab includes 14 post doctoral students, undergraduate and graduate students and high school interns from computer science and biology.