  {"id":2810,"date":"2026-06-11T09:54:42","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T13:54:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rivier.edu\/academics\/?page_id=2810"},"modified":"2026-06-12T13:28:29","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T17:28:29","slug":"mihaela-malita","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.rivier.edu\/academics\/department\/computer-science\/faculty\/mihaela-malita\/","title":{"rendered":"Mihaela Malita, Ph.D."},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Background<\/h2>\n<p>Dr. Mihaela Malita\u2019s teaching philosophy emphasizes deep understanding, curiosity, and innovation. She fosters a learning environment that promotes critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration, while blending theory with practice to prepare students for an evolving technological landscape and inspire lifelong learning and the ethical use of technology.<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Malita conducted her doctoral research on learning models and is the author of\u00a0<em>Coding Contest Problems: Workbook<\/em>, a collection of programming problems available on Amazon designed to help students write cleaner, more efficient code and develop new programming skills.<\/p>\n<p>Formerly a faculty member at Saint Anselm College, she holds the distinguished title of Professor Emerita. Dr. Malita has taught as a visiting professor at Smith College and Amherst College in Massachusetts and was a leading member of the technical team that helped establish Bright Scale, a Silicon Valley company.<\/p>\n<p>She also co-founded the New Hampshire chapter of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA-NH) in 2010 and organized high school programming contests from 2006 to 2022.<\/p>\n<h2>Education<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ph.D., University of Bucharest, Romania<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">M.S., University of Bucharest, Romania<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">B.S., University of Bucharest, Romania<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Specialties<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Parallel programming<\/li>\n<li>Programming languages<\/li>\n<li>Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence<\/li>\n<li>Intro to Programming through Art<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Courses Taught<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\">COMP 101\/COMP 103 Coding Adventures I\/ II<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\">COMP 505 Computer Science Fundamentals<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\">COMP 560 Python Programming<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\">COMP 585 Java Programming<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\">COMP 597 Multimedia and Web Development<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\">COMP 612 Information Technology<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\">COMP 699 Professional Seminar<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2><span data-olk-copy-source=\"MessageBody\">Recent Publications, Grants, and Proceedings<\/span><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\">Mihaela Malita, Book: <em>Coding Contest Problems: Workbook<\/em> on Amazon.com, 2026.<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\">Mihaela Malita, Gheorghe M. Stefan, <a href=\"https:\/\/www2.rivier.edu\/journal\/ROAJ-Fall-2023\/J1274_Malita%20and_Stefan_Fall-2023.pdf\">In-memory Parallel Processing for Matrix Transpose<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www2.rivier.edu\/journal\/\">InSight: Rivier Academic Journal<\/a> Fall 2023.<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\">Mihai Antonescu, Mihaela Malita, Gheorghe M. Stefan, &#8220;Avoiding Latencies of Log-Depth Parallel Computational Patterns&#8221;, ISPDC 2023, The 22nd IEEE International Symposium On Parallel and Distributed Computing, Bucharest, July 10-13, 2023.<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\">Mihaela Malita, Gheorghe M. Stefan, &#8220;A Recursive Hierarchy for Accelerator-Level Parallelism&#8221;, Proceedings of the 8th World Congress on Electrical Engineering and Computer Systems and Sciences (EECSS\u201922), Prague, Czech Republic &#8211; July 28- 30, 2022. Best Award Paper.<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\">Mihaela Malita, George-Vladut Popescu, Gheorghe M. Stefan, &#8220;Pseudo-Reconfigurable Heterogeneous Solution for Accelerating Spectral Clustering&#8221;, 2020 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Dec 10-13, 2020.<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\">Mihaela Malita, Ethel Schuster, &#8220;From Drawing to Coding: Teaching Programming with Processing&#8221;, The Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges Northeast Region (CCSCNE), 2020.<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\">Monica Dascalu, Mihaela Malita, Adrian Barbilian, Eduard Franti, Gheorghe M. Stefan &#8220;Enhanced Cellular Automata with Autonomous Agents for Covid-19 Pandemic Modeling&#8221;, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.romjist.ro\/abstract-651.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ROMJIST<\/a> Vol 23, No. S, 2020, pp. S15-S27.<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\">Mihaela Malita, Gheorghe M. Stefan,&#8221;Accelerating Clustering: &#8220;An Architectural Approach&#8221;, Computer and Information Science and Technology (CIST&#8217;20) August 13-15, 2020 (remote) <a href=\"https:\/\/cistseries.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">CIST&#8217;20<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Background Dr. Mihaela Malita\u2019s teaching philosophy emphasizes deep understanding, curiosity, and innovation. 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