Primary Job Title Associate Professor of Computer Science Primary Organization 
University of New Mexico
Location Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States Regions Western US Gender Female
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Professor Melanie Moses earned a B.S. from Stanford University in Symbolic Systems, an interdisciplinary program in cognition and computation, and a Ph.D. in Biology from the University of New Mexico in 2005. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico and External Faculty at the
Santa Fe Institute. Her interdisciplinary research exists at the boundaries of Computer Science and Biology with over 50 peer reviewed publications in computational and mathematical biology and biologically-inspired swarm robotics. Research in the Moses Lab focuses on computational modeling of complex biological systems, particularly on cooperative search strategies in immune systems and ant colonies. Her research also applies principles from biology to design computational systems, particularly robotic swarms that replicate ant behaviors to perform collective tasks. Her research lab includes 14 includes post docs, undergraduate and graduate students and high school interns from Computer Science and Biology.
Professor Moses was the co-director of the NIH funded UNM Program in Interdisciplinary Biological and Biomedical Sciences 2013 - 2015, and directs the CSforAll course, an introductory programming course in computer modeling and simulation in which 400 New Mexico high school students have been introduced to computer science and earned dual credit at UNM. Professor Moses is the Principal Investigator for the NASA Swarmathon, a swarm robotics competition that aims to engage 1000 students from Minority Serving Institutions to develop new swarm robotic algorithms to revolutionize space exploration. She is honored to have been a Ford Foundation Dissertation Diversity Fellow and a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship Finalist, and to have received the UNM Outstanding New Teacher of the Year Award and the School of Engineering New Faculty Awards for Excellence in Teaching and Research.
