Tyler Derr

Dr. Tyler Derr is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, with affiliate roles in the Data Science Institute and the Frist Center for Autism and Innovation. He holds a PhD from Michigan State University (2020) and focuses on data mining, machine learning, and graph neural networks with applications in drug discovery, ethical AI, and neurodiversity research.

• Education:
  • PhD in Computer Science, Michigan State University (2020)
  • M.S. in Computer Science, Pennsylvania State University
  • B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics, Pennsylvania State University

His research emphasizes interdisciplinary social good, including drug discovery, education equity, and autism innovation. He directs the Network and Data Science (NDS) Lab, mentoring students who have won 50+ awards. Notable contributions include tools like FairNNV for fairness certification and datasets like WelQrate for drug discovery benchmarking.

Awards include the NSF CAREER Award (2023), NVIDIA Academic Grant (2024), and Vanderbilt’s Career Catalyst Impact Award (2025). He co-founded the MLoG workshop series and serves on editorial boards for ACM TKDD and IEEE Transactions on Big Data.

• Grants & Leadership:
  • NSF Grant for student travel to KDD2024
  • NVIDIA BioNeMo Platform grant for peptide design
  • DOE Computational Science Fellowship advising

His work bridges theory and practice, with tutorials on graph ML at AAAI/KDD and keynotes on ethical AI. The NDS Lab hosts interdisciplinary collaborations in computational biology, transportation, and neurodiversity advocacy.