Weitzel, Yu receive promotions

The University of Nebraska–Lincoln will award promotion and/or tenure to 103 faculty in 2025. 

School of Computing faculty Derek Weitzel and Hongfeng Yu are among the faculty receiving promotions. Weitzel will be promoted to Research Associate Professor and Yu will be promoted to Professor.

Weitzel conducts research for the Holland Computing Center — the University of Nebraska’s high-performance computing core — as well as the Open Science Grid. His research focuses on distributed computing and data management, networking and security for cyberinfrastructure. Weitzel has worked in the Holland Computing Center since 2006. He worked as a research assistant and graduate research assistant while earning his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He became a Senior Software Engineer in the Holland Computing Center in 2015, and a Research Assistant Professor in 2019. In his role, Weitzel and his team have created, deployed, and operated cyberinfrastructure for Nebraska researchers as well as global cyberinfrastructure projects that have users throughout the world.

Yu currently serves as the director of the Holland Computing Center. He was officially named director in 2022 after serving as interim director since 2019. Yu, who joined Nebraska in 2012, is an expert in big data analysis and visualization, high-performance computing, and user interfaces and interaction. His work has produced scalable algorithms and systems that have helped scientists across the country find accurate, efficient visualizations for applications in climate modeling, geophysical analysis, medical imaging, plant phenotyping and more. Yu’s laboratory has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Energy, among others. This includes a $476,952 award from NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program, which supported Yu’s work to create software tools that expand network visualization capabilities.

See the full list of University of Nebraska–Lincoln faculty who received promotion and tenure honors in Nebraska Today.