Presenter

Dr. Sharlee Climer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Missouri – St. Louis. She is also a faculty member of the Center for Neurodynamics, at the University of Missouri – St. Louis, and the Hope Center for Neurological Disorders, at Washington University in St. Louis. She worked a postdoc at Washington University’s School of Medicine after receiving her PhD and MS in Computer Science from Washington University and the University of Missouri – St. Louis, respectively, and Bachelors degrees in Computer Science, Structural Engineering, and Physics. Dr. Climer was awarded UMSL’s Junior Faculty Investigator of the Year Award in 2020, UMSL’s Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Outstanding Research Award in 2019, ACM’s Gordon Bell Prize in 2018, Henning Andersen Prize in 2012, National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship in 2001, and Olin Fellowship in 2001. She is the founder of WomenCAN, a student group dedicated to promoting recruitment and retention of women in computer science and has served on the program committees for the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing (PASC) for more than five years. She has published more than 30 refereed research manuscripts, as well as a book, Limit Crossing, in which she presents strategies for utilizing upper- and lower-bounds in combinatorial optimization. Dr. Climer’s current research focuses the development of approximate and exact methods for identifying combinatorial patterns in big data, with a focus on genetic patterns associated with diseases, including Alzheimer disease and COVID-19.