Pradeep Khosla, New Dean of CIT

Byron SpiceWednesday, June 9, 2004

Mark Kamlet
Provost

June 9, 2004

Dear Colleagues,

It is with great pleasure and enthusiasm that I announce the appointment ofPradeep K. Khosla, the Philip and Marsha Dowd Professor of Electrical andComputer Engineering and Robotics, as dean of the College of Engineering,effective July 1. He replaces John Anderson, who left in April to becomeprovost at Case Western University.

A member of the CIT faculty since 1986 and an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon,Pradeep has invested enormous energy in the success of this university anddemonstrated his leadership in research and education initiatives withinCarnegie Mellon and internationally.

He currently is head of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.Pradeep's other leadership positions include being co-director of CyLab, auniversity-wide computer security research initiative, as well as directorof the Information Networking Institute.

Pradeep was a founding director of the Institute for Complex EngineeredSystems (ICES), and led the growth of ICES during the period 1997 to 1999by positioning it in several strategic areas. In 2003 he co-founded (withRich Pethia) CyLab a university level multidisciplinary research Instituteto address technology, policy, and management issues in measurable,available, secure, sustainable, and trustworthy computing and communicationsystems. We have asked Pradeep to retain his position as Co-Director ofCyLab and continue to provide leadership for this important effort.

During his 5-year tenure as department head, ECE grew more than 80% inresearch volume, hired 22 new faculty, defined several strategicmultidisciplinary research initiatives, and increased diversity in bothfaculty and graduate students. The Computer Engineering graduate programwas also ranked number one for the first time by U.S. News and World Reportin the 2002 rankings.

Since October 2000, under his leadership the Information NetworkingInstitute (INI) has increased its enrollment from 15 students per class tomore than 110 students starting Fall 2004; created a collaboration with theAthens Information Technology (AIT) Institute in Athens, Greece, to offerCarnegie Mellon's MSIN (Master of Science in Information Networking)degree; and defined the multidisciplinary MS in Information Security andTechnology management degree (MSISTM).

He is involved in electrical and computer engineering, design, and roboticseducation both at the graduate and the undergraduate levels. Hewas a memberof the committee that formulated a curriculum for the multidisciplinary PhDprogram in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon. He was also a member of the "Wipethe Slate Clean" Committee that created a new four-year undergraduate ECEdegree curriculum at Carnegie Mellon.In support of the new curriculum heproposed the notion of teaching engineering to freshmen and developed theintroductory freshman level course "Introduction to Electrical and ComputerEngineering" that emphasizes the notion of teaching in context. He is theco-author of a text book and a laboratory manual for this freshman course.

Pradeep received B. Tech (Hons) from IIT (Kharagpur, India), and both M.S.and Ph. D.degrees from Carnegie Mellon University. His research interestsare in the areas of collaborating and distributed autonomous roboticsystems, software composition and reconfigurable software for real-timeembedded systems, and secure embedded software and information systems.

Pradeep has graduated more than 50 MS and PhD students and is the author orco-author of more than 300 publications that include a textbook and alaboratory manual for ECE freshman course. An internationally renownedresearcher and educator, he is the recipient of several prestigious awards,including the Inlaks Foundation Fellowship,the Carnegie Institute ofTechnology Ladd award for excellence in research, two NASA Tech Briefawards, the ASEE George Westinghouse Award for Education, SiliconindiaLeadership award for Excellence in Academics and Technology, and the W.Wallace McDowell award from IEEE Computer Society. He is a Fellow of both,IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and AAAI (AmericanAssociation of Artificial Intelligence) and currently serves on editorialboards of IEEE Spectrum, and IEEE Security and Privacy.

He is a co-founder of QuantapointInc. - a high-tech company based inPittsburgh. In December 2002, he was appointed a member of the ITtransition team of Pennsylvania Governor-elect Ed Rendell and inFebruary2003 he was appointed to the National Research Council Board onManufacturing and Engineering Design for a three-year term. He also serveson advisory boards of several universities and companies including ITUVentures and Alcoa CIO's advisory board.

Please join me in congratulating Pradeep on this new appointment.

For More Information

Byron Spice | 412-268-9068 | bspice@cs.cmu.edu