UT Tyler Professor to Participate in NASA Fellowship Program
May 26, 2004
Dr.
Leonard Brown, assistant professor of computer science at The University
of Texas at Tyler, has been selected to participate in the 2004 NASA Faculty
Fellowship Program in Pasadena, Calif.
One of approximately 245 NASA Faculty Fellows, Dr. Brown was selected
in a highly competitive environment. This year, 762 individuals applied,
making the selection process extremely difficult, said Dr. Troy Henson,
dean of the UT Tyler College of Engineering and Computer Science.
As a Faculty Fellow, Dr. Brown will relocate for the summer to NASA’s
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, where his main task will
be to develop a database management system for the JPL Systems Management
Office (SMO). This task involves designing the architecture for the SMO
Information System, which includes planning, scheduling, assessment analysis,
project management and archiving.
“Dr. Brown’s research and teaching will be very important
to the development and growth of the computer information systems and
computer science programs at The University of Texas at Tyler,’’
Dr. Henson said.
A native of Oklahoma City, Dr. Brown joined the faculty at UT Tyler in
December 2003 after earning a doctorate of philoshophy in computer science
from the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Okla., specializing in database
management systems. He also received master of science and bachelor of
science degrees in computer science from the University of Oklahoma in
1997 and 1993, respectively.
His research interests include processing and evaluating content-based
image retrieval queries, multimedia indexing and performing image similarity
searches in multimedia database management systems. He has published several
technical papers in journals and conference proceedings and will be presenting
one of his papers this summer at a conference in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Since joining UT Tyler, Dr. Brown has been awarded internal research grants
from both the president’s office and the UT Tyler Faculty Research
Committee. While a graduate student, he was supported in part by NASA,
the U.S. Department of Education and the Regional AIDS Interfaith Network
of Oklahoma.
“Dr. Brown came to our campus with excellent academic credentials
and graduate teaching assistant awards, as well as more than three years
of industrial experience in computer information systems at AT&T and
Lucent Technologies,’’ Dr. Henson said.
“His research experience this summer will encourage other faculty,
will enable him to be a better teacher, will bring attention to opportunities
for faculty and students at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed
for NASA by the California Institute of Technology, and provide positive
visibility for UT Tyler.’’
When he returns to UT Tyler this fall, Dr. Brown will teach three courses
for the computer science department. These courses are Advanced Database
Management Systems, Computer Graphics and Programming with Data, File
and Object Structures.
