JSV

Jeffrey S. Vitter

Dean of Science

Purdue University
Mathematical Sciences Building
150 N. University Street
West Lafayette, IN 47907-2067 USA

http://www.science.purdue.edu/jsv/
Email: ScienceDean @ purdue.edu
Phone: (765) 494-1730
FAX: (765) 494-1736
Asst: Ms. Jennie Jones

Brief Biography

Jeff Vitter serves as the Frederick L. Hovde Dean of the College of Science and Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

As Dean, he is the chief academic officer and administrator of the College of Science. In approximate terms, the College of Science comprises 325 faculty members, 550 staff members, 1,000 graduate students, and 2,800 undergraduate majors, with a total annual budget of $130 million. The courses offered by the College account for about one-fourth of the University's 1 million student credit hours. Dean Vitter is responsible for overseeing the discovery, learning, engagement, and diversity activities of the College of Science's seven academic departments: Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, Mathematics, Physics, and Statistics. National rankings for departments and programs include information security (CERIAS) (#1), analytical chemistry (#2), information technology/information systems (CERIAS) (#2), computational science (#5), computer science (#9 and #19), statistics (#10), computer systems (#16), software engineering (#17), programming languages (#18), applied mathematics (#19), chemistry (#22), mathematics (#26), physics (#35), biological sciences (#42), and earth science (#43). In addition, the group in structural biology is internationally renowned.

The College has primary oversight over the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS), one of the world's leading centers in information security. CERIAS involves faculty from six colleges on campus, and it trains one-fourth of all the information security PhDs in the country. The College of Science partners with fellow colleges at Purdue in several other University centers, including the Purdue Climate Change Research Center (PCCRC), the Center for Structural Biology, the Center for Sensing Science and Technology (CSST), the Computing Research Institute (CRI), the Center for Research and Engagement in Science and Mathematics Education (CRESME), and the I-STEM educational resource network, as well as the 10 centers in Discovery Park, Purdue's interdisciplinary hub.

Several of Dean Vitter's strategic initiatives and accomplishments at Purdue—especially dealing with the College of Science's four pillars of learning, discovery, engagement, and diversity—are described in his expanded biography and full curriculum vitæ.

From 1993 to 2002, Dean Vitter was the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of Computer Science in the College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He served as chair of the Department of Computer Science at Duke from 1993-2001 and as co-director and a founding member of Duke's Center for Geometric and Biological Computing from 1997-2002. As chair, he led the Department to significant improvements in stature—characterized by a top-20 ranking, stellar faculty hires, a dynamic strategic plan, a departmental culture of inclusiveness, comprehensive curriculum redesign, administrative reorganization, substantial increases in both the undergraduate and graduate programs, creation of a successful industry partners program, and a rise in sponsored research expenditures to 250% of initial level. Previously from 1980-1993, he progressed through the faculty ranks and served in various leadership roles at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. His educational degrees include a B.S. with highest honors in Mathematics in 1977 from the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana; a Ph.D.in Computer Science under Don Knuth in 1980 from Stanford University in Stanford, California; and an M.B.A. in 2002 from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. His home town is New Orleans, Louisiana (as everyone who knows him knows!).

Dean Vitter sits on the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association, where he co-chairs the Government Affairs Committee, and he serves on the Board of Advisors for the School of Science and Engineering at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he previously served as adjunct faculty member. He has served as Chair of ACM SIGACT, the Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory of the world's largest computer professional organization, the Association for Computing Machinery. He has served on the Executive Council of the EATCS (European Association for Theoretical Computer Science), as well as on various review committees. Sabbatical sites have included Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley; Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (I.N.R.I.A.) in Rocquencourt, France; Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris; Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey; and I.N.R.I.A. in Sophia Antipolis, France.

Dean Vitter has been named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator, a Fulbright Scholar, and an IBM Faculty Development Awardee. He has over 250 book, journal, and conference publications reflecting the areas of interest described in his research summary; his Google Scholar h-index is 47. He is coauthor of the books Algorithms and Data Structures for External Memory (now Publishers, in press), Efficient Algorithms for MPEG Video Compression (Wiley & Sons), and Design and Analysis of Coalesced Hashing (Oxford University Press), coeditor of the collections External Memory Algorithms and Algorithm Engineering, and co-holder of patents in the areas of external sorting, parallel I/O, prediction, and approximate data structures. Editorial board memberships have included Algorithmica, Communications of the ACM, IEEE Transactions on Computers, Theory of Computing Systems (formerly Mathematical Systems Theory: An International Journal on Mathematical Computing Theory), and SIAM Journal on Computing; in addition, he has edited several special issues.

Personal Links

College of Science Links

Jeffrey S. Vitter / ScienceDean @ purdue.edu
Last modified: Sat May 10 17:28:14 EDT 2008