I am Associate Professor Pfaffmann of the Department of Computer Science at Lafayette College. I started at Lafayette College in the summer of 2003, earning tenure with promotion in 2010. I have served as Department Head for a total of four years and have coordinated two ABET reviews of the department.

My teaching varies and I have taught most of the courses in the department’s program. Recently, I have refocused on the systems aspect of the department’s curriculum (teaching Systems Organization and Operating Systems). While at Lafayette College I have taught the following courses extensively: Computer Organization (CS203), Software Engineering (CS205), Computers & Society (as CS200, VaST200, and VaST269), and Artificial Intelligence (CS420). Often a focus of my courses are substantive programming assignments and writing within the computer science discipline.  For Computers & Society, the focus is on the ethical questions that Computers and their use pose.

My research agenda focuses on large multi-agent models of biological and social systems that are stochastic discrete simulations that need to be explored empirically for emergent behavior. The exploration strategies involved include automated experimentation distributed across a large number of machines in a cluster, with later data analysis techniques to determine emergent properties.  My areas of interest are:

• Agent-Based Models of biological and social systems.
• Evolutionary-based exploration and automated experimentation.
• Biologically inspired models of computation.

I am a graduate of Wayne State University’s Department of Computer Science where I studied under Dr. Michael Conrad (WSU) as a member of the BioComputing Group, then later with Dr. Monica Brockmeyer (WSU) and Dr. Silvano Colombano (NASA-Ames). During this time, my focus was on models of biological systems to explore their potential for information processing, computer science more broadly, and course work in biology focusing on eukaryotic cells.