Christina Boucher, Ph.D., an associate professor at the UF Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE), was named a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). 

Dr. Boucher’s research focuses on compressed data structures and data compression. These techniques are useful when working with large data sets and they allow you to shrink the file size to something that is easier to manage. Typically, you would need to uncompress the data to work with it, but Dr. Boucher is working on developing methods to keep it compressed allowing for faster queries on the data.  

Most recently, she has been working with NVIDIA on combining data compression techniques with machine learning to allow them to train very large models on biological data. Working with NVIDIA allows access to GPU systems instead of CPU systems which accelerate data compression and data access. 

“I feel very grateful that our work is being recognized by the research community. By continuing our collaboration with IEEE via submission to their conferences and journals we will be able to further make our data compression methods more publicly available and disseminate them to the community,” Dr. Boucher said.  

Dr. Boucher serves as associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (TCBB) frequently publishes research for the Data Compression Conference, an international forum for current work on data compression and related applications. She also serves as a standing member of the Biodata Management and Analysis (BDMA) Study Section for the Center for Scientific Review at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

To obtain IEEE senior member status, you must have been in professional practice for 10 years in an IEEE designated field and show significant performance over a period of at least five of the 10 years in practice. Senior member is the highest grade for which IEEE members can apply.