About

Hridesh Rajan holds a Ph.D. and an MS from the University of Virginia both in Computer Science. His B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering is from the Indian Institute of Technology, Varanasi (formerly IT-BHU). Dr. Rajan is the Kingland Professor and Chair of Computer Science at Iowa State University, where he served three years (2017-2019) as the founding Professor-in-charge of Data Science Programs. During this period, he founded the annual Midwest Big Data Summer School to deliver broadly accessible data science training, served on the steering committee of the Midwest Big Data Hub, and led TADS (Theoretical and Applied Data Science), a cross-campus transdisciplinary research initiative of faculty and students interested in foundations and applications of Data Science. After this, he is serving as the Department Chair of Computer Science since 2019, where he oversaw a significant growth period in both students, faculty, staff, and research funding. During his tenure as Department Chair, Dr. Rajan led the effort in diversity and inclusion leading to departmental broadening participation in computing plan and a 45% increase in female enrollment. Dr. Rajan has led the creation of new majors, minors and certificates including the M.S. degree in Artificial Intelligence, the Data Science Minor, Certificate, and B.S. degree programs, the B.A. degree in Computer Science. Rajan is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a Fulbright Scholar. His research interests are in Data Science, Software Engineering and Programming Languages where he is most known for his design of the Ptolemy programming language that showed how to modularly reason about crosscutting concerns and the Boa programming language and its infrastructure that decreases the barriers to data-driven software engineering. He has been recognized by an NSF CAREER award in 2009, by the LAS Early Achievement in Research Award in 2010, a Big-12 Fellowship in 2012, an ACM Senior Membership in 2014, an exemplary mentor for Junior Faculty award in 2017, a Kingland Endowed Professorship in 2017, an ACM Distinguished Membership in 2017, a US-UK Fulbright Scholarship in 2018, a Facebook Probability and Programming Award in 2020, and an Early Achievement in Departmental Leadership Award in 2022. He served on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, and currently serves on the advisory board of Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages. He was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies in Bangalore India from 2000 - 2001. Prof. Rajan is an ABET program evaluator.

Short bio (for talks, etc.)

Hridesh Rajan is the Kingland Professor and Chair in the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University. Prof. Rajan’s research interests are in programming languages, software engineering, and data science where he is most known for his design of the Ptolemy programming language that showed how to modularly reason about crosscutting concerns and the Boa programming language and its infrastructure that decreases the barriers to data-driven software engineering. He has been recognized by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) with a CAREER award, an Early Achievement in Research Award, a Big-12 Fellowship, the Kingland Professorship, and an exemplary mentor for Junior Faculty award. Prof. Rajan is a AAAS Fellow, US-UK Fulbright scholar, distinguished member of the ACM, and serves as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

Major Awards and Honors

2009 Early CAREER Award, US National Science Foundation
2010 Early Achievement in Research Award, College of Liberal Arts & Science, Iowa State University
2012 Big-12 Fellowship
2014 ACM Senior Member
2016-17 Emerging Leaders Academy.
2016 Kingland Professorship.
2016-17 Exemplary Mentor of Junior Faculty, Iowa State University.
2017 ACM Distinguished Member.
2018 Fulbright US-UK Scholar.
2020 Facebook Probability and Programming Award
2020 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ESEC/FSE 2020
2021 AAAS Fellow
2022 Early Achievement in Departmental Leadership Award
2023 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ASE 2023

Former Graduate Students

Mohammad Wardat (PhD Summer’23), Assistant Professor at Oakland University
Sumon Biswas (PhD Spring’22, MS Fall’20), Postdoctoral Researcher at Carnegie Mellon University
Rangeet Pan (PhD Summer’22), Research Staff Member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Samantha Khairunnessa (PhD Summer’21, MS Fall’17), Assistant Professor at Florida Gulf Coast University
Hamid Bagheri (PhD Summer’20, MS Fall’19), Data Scientist at John Deere
Md. Johirul Islam (PhD Summer’20, MS Fall’19), Amazon R&D
Ganesha Upadhyaya (PhD Fall’17, MS Spring’15), Harmony.One R&D
Mehdi Bagherzadeh (PhD Summer’16, MS Fall’10), Assistant Professor at Oakland University
Yuheng Long (PhD Spring’16, MS Spring’10), Google
Robert Dyer (PhD Fall’13, MS Fall’08), Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Tyler Sondag (PhD Fall’11, MS Fall’09), Intel R&D
Samantha Khairunnessa (MS Fall’17), ISU Ph.D. Program
Ramanathan Ramu (MS Fall’17), Microsoft
Nitin M. Tiwari (MS Spring’17), SAP
Sean L. Mooney (MS Summer’15), SourceAllies
Harish Narayanappa (MS Spring’10), eBay
Jaikishan Jalan (MS Fall’09), Squad
Youssef W. Hanna (MS Fall’08), Google
Rakesh Setty (MS Fall’08), eBay
Mahantesh Hosamani (MS Fall’07), Ericsson

Academic Geneology

My advisor at University of Virginia was Kevin Sullivan, whose advisor was David Notkin. My academic genealogy goes all the way to Edsger Dijkstra.

In prior life, I worked at Bell Labs India, the R&D organization of Lucent Technologies. At the time, I was interested in bandwidth and power optimization issues in mobile ad hoc & sensor networks as they scale up. I still keep up with these topics.

Contact me

You can contact me using either of the e-mail addresses below. When writing, please substitute firstname with hridesh.

Work: firstname@iastate.edu
Personal: firstname@gmail.com