NURTURING RESILIENCE THROUGH THE PANDEMIC
THIRD CONFERENCE OF ROMANIAN AMERICAN PROFESSIONALS
June 5th 2021
Panel on promoting mentoring and research achievements in STEM and IT:
The third presenter of the STEM panel was Department of Computer Science, Purdue University Associate Professor Elena Grigorescu. Her research focuses on theoretical computer science, proving mathematical theorems about algorithms performance. She looks at the design of algorithms that deal with large data and specializes in algorithms that recover the information from data that is noisy. She designs algorithms that are ultra-efficient (run in “sublinear time”). Associate Professor Grigorescu gave credit to her mentors who chiseled her formation, professors in Romania and in the US whom she was proud to name as professional giants on whose shoulders she stands. It was her mentors who encouraged her to publish her research and who collaborated on her first scientific papers. She is now herself a mentor, overseeing the formation of doctoral students. Despite the taxing challenges posed by the pandemic, research and teaching continues with spatial distances seemingly abridged in ways that create ambiguity about our presences and the ways we remain anchored simultaneous in personal and professional circles. As a means of giving back to the community of her birth and upbringing, while physically in Romania, Grigorescu found the resources to organize virtual national workshops on algorithms, titled “Romanian Algorithms Days” (June 7-8th, 2021). The invited lecturers to this virtual symposium is not limited to Romanians in the country but extends to professionals spread throughout the world.