Eunice Santos is the Ron Hochsprung Endowed Chair and Professor of Computer Science at Illinois Tech. An award-winning researcher and teacher, Santos was professor of computer science at the University of Texas El Paso (UTEP) and chaired the Department of Computer Science there. She also was the founding director of the Institute of Defense & Security at UTEP.
Santos joined UTEP in 2009 after serving as a Senior Research Fellow at the U.S. Department of Defense’s Center for Technology and National Security Policy. Before that, she was a professor at Virginia Tech in the Department of Computer Science and the Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology (GBCB) Program; prior to that, she was a professor at Lehigh University in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Santos earned her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and has B.S. and M.S. degrees in both mathematics and computer science.
She has received numerous awards, including a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, the IEEE-CS Technical Achievement Award for pioneering work in computational social systems, and the Robinson Faculty Award. She also has received multiple teaching awards including the Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching. She was the founding co-editor in chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems. Santos is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Santos works in the areas of large-scale distributed processing, computational modeling, cybersecurity, cloud computing, large-scale information processing, complex adaptive systems, and human modeling with applications to the biological, physical and social sciences.