Hometown: Los Gatos, California
Major: Computer Science
Liam Strand graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor's in Computer Science from the School of Engineering. He was additionally awarded the David Krumme Award for Experimental Computer Science and received Honorable Mention for the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award. Liam’s next two plus years will be spent at Northwestern University pursuing a master’s degree in Computer Science and doing research to enable frictionless parallelism in computer systems.
Liam grew up with his two older brothers in Los Gatos, California. He also spent summers and the two years prior to Tufts living with his parents and working on Nantucket. From an early age, Liam was involved in broadening access to knowledge. At Tufts, he was a Teaching Assistant for the introductory computer science course, where students arrive with a variety of educational backgrounds. Liam focused on creating a supportive atmosphere to ensure all students had the opportunity to succeed, regardless of prior experience or future plans. He was also a TA for CS 40, where he led labs and often stayed up late helping students debug their image compression algorithms, and worked during his senior year with Prof. Joel Grodstein and Prof. Mark Sheldon in their parallel computing and concurrent programming courses which expose students to asynchronous, high-performance software.
Starting in his freshman year, Liam was active in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BCB) research group. Working under Prof. Lenore Cowen, he designed and implemented a suite of software tools to streamline the creation of MEDFORD files, a new file type developed by the BCB group to record metadata in a human-readable and machine-parsable format. The work developing these tools, and their impact is detailed in Context-Sensitive Editing for the MEDFORD Metadata Language, a paper Liam presented at the 17th International Conference on Metadata and Semantics in Milan, Italy.
Liam also helped foster a tight-knit community in the Computer Science Department though JumboCode and by organizing extracurricular events and programs ranging from movie nights to the CS intramural soccer league. His passion for public transportation led him to spearhead an event around the opening of the MBTA’s Green Line Extension to Tufts. Liam arranged a mass sleepover in Cummings the night before the opening to allow Tufts students to ride the first train. It was an opportunity for people from all corners of Tufts and Tufts’ host community to come together, meet new friends, and celebrate.
For fun, Liam loved singing in Tufts’ choirs and creating music with friends as keyboardist in their band “Taking Names” and continues to meet weekly with a team of judges to evaluate manuscripts for a Short Play Festival. Liam treasures carving out time to cook hearty meals, read real books, and occasionally watch an episode (or three) of Star Trek. He hopes to continue doing as many of these activities as possible at Northwestern University and beyond!
Liam Strand, E24