Bio

Diba Mirza is a teaching-track faculty (LPSOE) in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
She received her PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of California, San Diego. Following her PhD, she worked as a post doc at the CSE department at UC San Diego where she became interested in teaching. Since then she has taught Computer Science courses to undergraduates at all levels of the bachelors program. Prior to accepting her current position at UCSB, she was an assistant adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego.

Dr. Mirza's primary interest is to help all students, specially those in the early years of the undergraduate program realize their full potential and discover the joy of learning. She seeks to do this by creating a supportive environment and by designing innovative, hands-on curricula. She has spent numerous summers applying these ideas in specialized programs for incoming freshmen and aspiring high school students. She was a faculty member at the Summer Program for Incoming Students (SPIS) and the California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science (COSMOS), where she taught students with little or no prior experience in Computer Science, college-level Computer Science and worked with them on fun embedded systems and robotics projects.

Research

Dr. Mirza's research interest is in embedded systems with application to cyber-physical systems. She has worked with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, on developing underwater robotic swarms that can help scientists learn more about the ocean. This collaboration resulted in a journal publication in Nature Communications and several IEEE journal publications. She is the author of six journal papers and numerous peer-reviewed conference papers. 

Honors and Awards

• Faculty of the Year in the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego
• Faculty of the Year award from the Tau Beta Pi engineering honors society at UC San Diego.