A beautiful connection between math and practice

For assistant professor Dr. Faezeh Ensan, her computer science journey began in high school where she fell in love with coding. “I loved the way I could instruct the machine to solve complex problems for me,” said Ensan.

This led to her pursuing a bachelor’s degree in computer science at the University of Tehran. After seeing that the topic had “a beautiful connection between math and practice”, as Ensan describes it, the researcher decided to continue her education and complete both her master’s and PhD in computer science. Today, along with educating students at FEAS, Ensan’s is exploring three main research paths within this subject. 

While all her research fall under the information and data retrieval umbrella, they are distinctly unique. Her first area of research focuses on question answering, where she is looking to devise and develop algorithms that, when given a question, can retrieve the most related and appropriate piece of answers to us. By looking to find the most efficient ranking system for data, Dr. Ensan’s second research path aims to create this type of model, even with data that has been negatively impacted by sources such as bias or incompletion. The computer scientist’s last area of research hopes to create the best queries for retrieving scientific biomedical papers. With thousands of research papers published every year, Dr. Ensan looks to devise algorithms to help experts find all the related research on a single topic, rather than searching through thousands of results on different search engines.

Despite all of these different research paths, Dr. Ensan says her proudest achievement throughout her time at FEAS has been the opportunity to train her undergraduate and graduate students and teach them that they are capable of doing something new. Dr. Ensan describes how her role as an assistant professor marries her two great passions: computer science and teaching the engineers of tomorrow.

“I love communicating and training young brains. It’s kind of like a learning experience for myself as well,” said Dr. Ensan. “My role is exciting because it’s not just about applying your knowledge and experience, but also helping fresh minds to learn this information.”