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 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 served as the Department Chair of Computer Science from 2019-2023, 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 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. See news here.
  • 2016 Kingland Professorship. See news here.
  • 2016-17 Exemplary Mentor of Junior Faculty, Iowa State University. See news here.
  • 2017 ACM Distinguished Member. See news here.
  • 2018 Fulbright US-UK Scholar. See news here.
  • 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

Former Graduate Students

  • 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.