About

Hridesh Rajan holds a Ph.D. and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Virginia, and a B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi (formerly IT-BHU). He currently serves as the Dean of the School of Science and Engineering at Tulane University and as a Professor in the Department of Computer Science.

Before Tulane, he was the Kingland Professor and Chair of Computer Science at Iowa State University from 2019 to 2024, and the founding Professor-in-Charge of Data Science Programs from 2017 to 2019. During this period he established the annual Midwest Big Data Summer School, 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.

As Department Chair from 2019 to 2024, he oversaw significant growth in students, faculty, staff, and research funding. His leadership in equity, diversity, and inclusion led to a departmental broadening-participation-in-computing plan and a 45% increase in female enrollment. He spearheaded several new academic programs, including the M.S. in Artificial Intelligence, the Data Science Minor, Certificate, and B.S. degrees, and the B.A. in Computer Science.

His research interests are in trustworthy AI, software engineering, and programming languages, where he is most known for the design of the Ptolemy programming language, which showed how to modularly reason about crosscutting concerns, and the Boa programming language and infrastructure, which lowers the barriers to data-driven software engineering. He has served on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, and currently serves on the advisory board of the Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages and the steering committee of SPLASH.

Earlier in his career, he was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, in Bangalore, India, from 2000 to 2001. He was an ABET program evaluator from 2018 to 2024, and now serves as a commissioner for the ABET Computing Accreditation Commission.