Krzysztof Cios, professor in the College of Engineering and Applied Science, has been inducted into the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Cios was inducted after being nominated by academy members and receiving the approval of two-thirds of the membership. His induction was then confirmed by the President of Poland.

“To become a member is really an honor, particularly when you look at the caliber of the individuals who are in the academy,” Cios said. “I’m not only honored, I’m overwhelmed.”

Membership in the academy as a foreign member honors Cios' entire body of work in the areas of learning algorithms, data mining and computational biology. His primary contributions are in designing efficient algorithms for the extraction of information from large bodies of data and modeling of biological systems.

Throughout his tenure, Cios has obtained $2.5 million in research funding for 36 projects, has written 48 journal articles – garnering two best paper awards – and edited and authored two books, Medical Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (2001) and Data Mining Methods for Knowledge Discovery (1998). He has written more than 60 conference papers and 12 book chapters.

Cios came to the downtown Denver campus of the University of Colorado Denver in 2000 from the University of Toledo, where he worked for 15 years, most recently as Interim Chair and co-founder of the bioengineering department. As a chair of the Computer Science and Engineering Department, he established a joint doctoral program in Computer Science and Information Systems, together with the College of Business. The program is in its third year with nearly 30 students.

Many students have chosen computational biology as their area of study, established within the joint PhD program.  One of Cios' additional goals was to take the departmental undergraduate program in Computer Science and Engineering thorough the first-ever ABET accreditation, which required major revamping of its existing curricula. The program went through a successful ABET visit last year and was accredited.

Cios was also instrumental in establishing the University of Colorado Center for Computational Biology, together with Professor Harvey Greenberg as its founder. The center is housed on the downtown Denver campus and is a collaborative effort with the Fitzsimons, Boulder and Colorado Springs campuses. Cios serves as associate director. He is also associate director of the University of Colorado Institute for Bioenergetics in Colorado Springs. 

In spring 2004 Cios was selected as a recipient of the Excellence in Research and Creative Activities Award for his college, and in the summer spent a month in Japan as visiting professor at the Muroran Institute of Technology.