Rate My Professor Apan Qasem

Apan Qasem is a Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Computer Science at Texas State University, where he has been a faculty member since 2007. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University in July 2007, with a dissertation titled 'Automatic Tuning of Scientific Applications,' supervised by Ken Kennedy and John Mellor-Crummey. Qasem leads the Compilers Research Lab (CRL) at Texas State University, focusing on high-performance computing projects that develop machine-learning compilers and runtime systems to improve programmer productivity, application performance, and energy efficiency on heterogeneous high-performance computing architectures. His research interests also encompass computer science education, including the creation of pedagogical tools, integration of emerging topics into the curriculum, accessibility for non-majors, and efforts to increase participation of underrepresented groups in computing. He has taught a variety of courses at Texas State University, such as Foundations of Computer Science (including Honors sections from 2010 to 2019), Computer Architecture since Spring 2010, Program Translators and Crafting Compilers from 2008 to 2017, High-Performance Computing since Fall 2017, and others including Unix Systems Programming and Coding and Data Skills for Communicators.

Qasem's research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, including a CAREER award in 2013, the Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, Semiconductor Research Corporation, AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, and IBM, which granted him a Faculty Award in 2008. From 2016 to 2019, he served as a Visiting Scholar at AMD Research in Austin as a member of the PathForward team within the Exascale Computing Project. In 2015, he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics under the guidance of Mike O'Boyle. His scholarly contributions include his Ph.D. dissertation and numerous peer-reviewed publications in areas such as compiler optimizations, GPU kernel restructuring, energy-efficient multithreaded kernels, and parallel performance concepts, with over 740 citations documented on Google Scholar. Qasem contributes to projects like STEM-CLEAR for contextualized learning pathways, ToUCH for teaching undergraduates collaborative and heterogeneous computing, and TXST-TUES for integrating parallelism into the undergraduate curriculum.