The Department of Computer Science reached a milestone last month when the 200th Ph.D. degree in computer science was awarded.
Nine Georgia State students earned a Ph.D. in December, bringing the department’s total number of graduates to 206. The December degree recipients were Khadija Ashraf, Brendan Camp, Faris Hawamdeh, Guangxi Lu, Robert Podschwadt, Sayed Hossein Saghaeiannejad, Honghui Xu, Yang Ye, and Kainan Zhang.
At the time the Department of Computer Science was created in 1999, it awarded only B.S. and M.S. degrees. The Ph.D. program was approved by the Board of Regents in 2000; the department began admitting students soon afterward. The first two graduates of the program were Ajay Katangur and Bryson Payne, who earned their degrees in 2004. It took 12 years for the Ph.D. program to reach 100 graduates but only seven additional years to go from 100 graduates to 200.
Dr. Raj Sunderraman, the department’s associate chair, maintains a list of all computer science Ph.D. graduates.