Alberto Segre, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science, is a nationally recognized leader in computational epidemiology whose work strengthens how infectious diseases are detected and controlled. He co-founded the UI Computational Epidemiology Research Group, bringing together experts in computing, medicine, public health, and the social sciences to model disease spread, detect outbreaks early, and guide health care decision-making.

Segre is interested in distributed algorithms for solving optimization problems. His past work has focused on problems from the biological sciences, including linkage analysis problems from statistical genetics, and protein structure prediction techniques. He has also worked on parallel search algorithms such as A*, αβ-minimax, Davis-Loveland-Putnam, and applications of these algorithms to both standard AI problems and economic problems such as combinatorial auction winner determination.