We are deeply saddened to announce that Marc Pomplun, the Computer Science department chair and a beloved colleage, passed away on January 18, 2025. He was 55. Marc was admired by his colleagues and students alike. He enjoyed teaching and mentoring students and passionately incorporated creative ways to bring to life the concepts he taught in the classroom. He was also widely appreciated for his major contributions to UMass Boston having served as department chair since Summer 2019.

Marc was born in Ratzeburg, Germany and grew up in Lübeck, Germany. He was the only child of his mother Petra (neé Liesener), who is 82 and lives in Lübeck, and his late father Hasko Pomplun. He completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at Bielefeld University in Bielefeld, Germany. He conducted his doctoral research under Professor Helge Ritter and later completed postdoctoral work at the University of Toronto before coming to UMass Boston in 2002.

At the start of his career at UMass Boston, Marc’s research focused on developing computational models of visual attention. His more recent work centered on facial recognition, object detection, tracking and recognition, and LLM aided image, video, and data analysis. He received numerous awards and grants for his research, including the UMass Boston Outstanding Achievement Award for Research, and grants from the U.S. Department of Education, NIH/National Eye Institute, and NSF. Marc taught a variety of courses in computer science, including, but not limited to, Introduction to Software Engineering, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, and Applied Discrete Mathematics.

Marc married Michelle Umali in 2007 at the New York Botanical Garden. She describes Marc as a very thoughtful and loving husband. He was the proud papa of their cats Magnus and Hans, who would occasionally appear in lecture slides. He was also a caring son who spoke with his parents regularly in Germany. Marc has remained in close contact with his childhood friends from Germany and would often meet with them over Zoom. His favorite football team was Bayern-Münich, and in his free time he enjoyed playing online chess. His most recent hobby included collecting acorns during walks in Central Park with Michelle and planting them. So far, he has had one tiny success, which they hope will grow into a small oak tree. Marc famously had what Michelle and his family call “German humor,” with the humor lying in the fact that the jokes were “genuinely terrible.”

Everyone who knew Marc describe him as exremely kind, bright and genuine, and as a wonderful colleauge and mentor. He will be profoundly missed by his family, his colleagues here at the University and elsewhere, and by his former students.