Evangelos “Vagelis” Papalexakis, a professor and Ross Family Chair in Computer Science at UC Riverside, has been selected to participate in a prestigious national symposium hosted by the National Academy of Engineering.
Papalexakis is one of 74 early-career engineers in the United States chosen for the 2025 Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. The event recognizes leading researchers in academia, industry, and government for innovative work across a variety of disciplines. It will be held Sept. 14–17 at the University of Pennsylvania.
This year’s symposium will focus on advances in neural engineering, next-generation computing and quantum technologies, fusion energy, and sustainable aerial mobility. The academy selects symposium participants through a competitive nomination process. Past participants have gone on to hold leadership positions throughout the U.S. engineering community.
“I’m humbled and honored to be selected as part of this highly inter-disciplinary group,” said Papalexakis, who was recently promoted to full professor in UCR’s Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering.
“This is an exciting opportunity to not only showcase our work at UCR, but to learn from peers and identify new avenues of collaborations and ways in which the methods we develop here at UCR can help tackle emerging challenges in computing and engineering.”
Papalexakis’ research lies at the intersection of signal processing, data science, and machine learning, with a focus on mathematical frameworks for analyzing complex, multi-dimensional data. His work has applications ranging from experimental physics to social network analysis and from behavioral neuroscience to precision agriculture.
A native of Athens, Greece, Papalexakis earned his doctorate in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. He joined UCR in 2016 and has received several honors, including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and multiple early career research awards, such as the IEEE ICDM 2022 Tao Li Award and 2025 PAKDD Early Career Research Award, both of which award excellence in data mining.