For my academic career, my fondest memories revolve around my PhD students.
When a professor mentors a new graduate student through the completion of a PhD, a bond develops akin to a parent-child bond.
This virtual family grows as the virtual children of the professor mentor their PhD students.
My journey started with two virtual parents David Waltz and John Holland.
David was the chair of my PhD committee at the University of Illinois, and at the Univ of Michigan John Holland was my mentor.
David, John, and I attended a 1983 workshop, and this photo shows David and John there.
My first PhD student was Hafedh Mili. I was at the National Library of Medicine and George Washington University and Hafedh was my employee at NLM and student at GWU. Hafedh is a superb and kind intellect who is a
Professor of Computer Science at the University of Quebec at Montreal for the past 37 years and Founder and Director of its Transdisciplinary Computer Ecosystems Research Center.
Hafedh invited me to a conference that he organized in Montreal in 2005, and this photo captures Hafedh and me at a conference dinner.
At the University of Liverpool my team included a dozen PhD students. The first PhD graduate was Mahmoud Mhashi in 1991. He has been a Professor and Head of Computer Information Systems
at University of Tabuk in Saudi Arabia for 16 years.
At a dinner party in Tabuk at a 2013 Conference, we rode camels -- me on a camel on the left and Mahmoud, on the right.
My Chinese students at the University of Liverpool particularly impressed me. My first PhD student at Liverpool was Weigang Wang who has retired from a faculty post at the University of Machester School of Business.
My last Chinese student at Liverpool was Chaomei Chen who has been a Professor of Computing at Drexel University for 24 years and is Founding Editor of the journal "Information Visualization" and author of 8 seminal books about information visualization.
This 1992 photo in my Liverpool office shows Weigang rightmost front row and Chaomei rightmost back row.
My last two PhD students were Jie Du and Hayden Wimmer at Univ Maryland Baltimore County.
Jie is Professor and Chair of the Department of Information Sciences at Grand Valley State University,
and Hayden is Professor of Information Technology at Georgia Southern University and President of the Faculty Senate.
Jie on far right next to her mother and son followed by me and her husband in the reception hall of my house 2009.
