New Chair and Associate Chair Named for BYU Department of Computer Science

Parris K. Egbert has accepted an appointment to serve as Chair of the BYU Computer Science Department effective June 1, 2008. Dr. Egbert replaces Tony R. Martinez who has served as Chair of the department the past nine years.

Christophe Giraud-Carrier has been appointed to serve as the Associate Chair of the department. Dr. Giraud-Carrier is Associate Professor and coordinator of the Data Mining laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at BYU. Prior to joining BYU, he was Senior Manager at ELCA, a Swiss IT services company, where his responsibilities included the capitalization of Data Mining expertise, responses to tenders and the management of various projects for companies, local governments and NGOs. Prior to this, he was Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol, where he founded and led the Machine Learning Research Group. Dr Giraud-Carrier received a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Computer Science at BYU in 1991, 1993, and 1994, respectively.

Dr. Giraud-Carrier is married to the former Isabelle Mauclair, and they are the parents of 8 children.

Parris K. Egbert received B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from Utah State University in 1986. He then attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he completed M.S. (1990) and Ph.D. (1992) degrees in Computer Science. Upon completion of his Ph.D., he joined the BYU Computer Science faculty.

Dr. Egbert is the director of the 3D Computer Graphics Lab in the Computer Science department at BYU, which is currently conducting research in several areas related to interactive 3D graphics and virtual environments. This work has been published in SIGGRAPH, CVPR, Transactions on Graphics, Computational Intelligence, and other journals and conferences. He is also a member of the executive committee for the Center for Animation at BYU.

Dr. Egbert's research interests include real-time 3D computer graphics, Global Illumination for Computer Graphics, Object-oriented graphics, tools for Computer Animation, and the Creation and Navigation of Virtual Environments.

Dr. Egbert is married to the former Lori Gurr, and they are the parents of nine children.