Turner College welcomes 5 new faculty

August 23, 2024

Five new faculty members, including two Columbus State University alumni, join the D. Abbott Turner College of Business & Technology this fall. They are among the 19 new full-time faculty joining the university for the 2024-25 academic year.

“These educators bring their expertise to some of the college’s fastest-growing majors and our region’s highest-demand career fields,” said Dr. Deborah Kidder, dean & Bill Heard Endowed Chair of Business Administration. “Each demonstrates how business and technology intersect both in the classroom and in professional practice.”

Janice Canedo ’12, ’16 joins the TSYS School of Computer Science this fall as a lecturer. As a practitioner, she focused on business analytics, data science, computer security and site reliability engineering. Through her past teaching and research assistant roles, she worked within multiple frameworks, languages and protocols from Python development to Docker and Kubernetes orchestration. Canedo earned two degrees at Columbus State—a bachelor’s in computer science and a master’s in applied computer science—before completing a master’s in computer science with a focus on computer security at Auburn University. 

Md Amjad Hossain joins the TSYS School of Computer Science faculty this fall as an assistant professor. Before completing his doctoral degree in computer science from Kent State University, he earned a bachelor’s in computer science and engineering from Khulna (Bangladesh) University of Engineering & Technology. He served on the teaching faculty at KUET, Shepherd University (West Virginia) and Emporia State University (Kansas). His teaching and research will focus on distributed systems, multimedia computing and networking, machine learning, and image processing.

Christopher Lovelock ’12 will serve as a lecturer in the TSYS School of Computer Science and Nexus Cybersecurity Program. Before joining the CSU faculty, he taught cybersecurity at nearby Harris County High School in Hamilton. His teaching experience also includes middle grades mathematics, technology and engineering, and computer science in the Muscogee County School District. In addition to his master of arts in teaching and endorsement in computer science education from Columbus State, he holds a bachelor’s in business management from Auburn University.

Tuan (Tom) Ngo begins his tenure this fall as an assistant professor in the Department of Management & Marketing, where his teaching and research will focus on strategic management, general management, entrepreneurship, machine learning and artificial intelligence. He obtained his doctoral degree in management from the University of Wisconsin–Madison after earning a master’s in public policy and a bachelor’s in business administration from the National University of Singapore. He previously served as an instructor (during his doctoral training) at UWM and as a research assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University’s University Park campus. His professional experience outside academia includes tenure at General Electric Asia Pacific in corporate finance (in Singapore and Thailand), co-founding a nonprofit organization, and providing management consulting services across various sectors.

Rahmatullah Roche comes to the TSYS School of Computer Science as an assistant professor from Virginia Tech, where he received its prestigious Pratt Fellowship. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science at Virginia Tech after completing a master’s in computer science and software engineering at Auburn University and a bachelor’s in computer science at Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology. He taught previously at Eastern University (Dhaka, Bangladesh) and Auburn University. His teaching and research will focus on artificial intelligence, applied machine learning and computational biology—topics for which he’s published in top-tier scientific journals.

More than 1,700 students and 89 full- and part-time faculty and staff call the Turner College and its three academic departments and schools home. For a directory of and information about Columbus State’s faculty and staff, visit columbusstate.edu/profiles.

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Media contact: Michael Tullier, APR, Executive Director of Strategic Communication + Marketing, 706.507.8729, mtullier@columbusstate.edu