Greg Bodwin named Morris Wellman Professor

Assistant Professor Greg Bodwin has been named a Morris Wellman Faculty Development Professor. The professorship is awarded to junior faculty members in recognition of outstanding contributions to teaching and research.

Bodwin’s research in theoretical computer science focuses on graph algorithms, data structures, sketching, game theory, and combinatorics. He has spearheaded significant advances in these areas, with his current projects concentrating on fault-tolerant spanners, understanding the combinatorial structure of shortest paths, and investigating the reducibility of metric graph structures.

The overall goal of Bodwin’s projects is to understand the structure of paths and distances in graphs, and to leverage this structural knowledge to improve algorithms for shortest path finding and distance compression. The aim is to improve the speed and accuracy of various computing applications, from routing and navigation in networks to machine learning and data mining.

Bodwin’s research has been featured in field-leading conferences such as the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS), the ACM SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), and the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), where his paper “Restorable Shortest Path Tiebreaking for Edge-Faulty Graphs” was recognized with a Best Paper Award in 2021. He was awarded an NSF grant in 2022 to support his work on graph sketching, a more cost-effective and energy-efficient method of network graph analysis.

Bodwin has also made indelible contributions to the U-M and CSE communities. He helped develop and serves as co-PI of the MACSS scholars program, which received $1.5 million in funding from the NSF to provide financial and educational support for low-income students who plan to major in computer science, data science, or math.

About the Morris Wellman Faculty Development Professorship

Michael P. Wellman, the Richard H. Orenstein Division Chair of Computer Science and Engineering and Lynn A. Conway Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, endowed the Morris Wellman Faculty Development Professorship in his grandfather’s name. Morris Wellman was an engineer who worked for most of his career as a civil servant of the City of New York.