Dr. Sanguthevar Rajasekaran, the UTC Chair Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). AAAS is an international non-profit organization dedicated to advancing science around the world. The organization’s scope includes publication of Science magazine and educational and policy initiatives.
Fellows are elected by their peers in recognition of their scientific contributions. Dr. Rajasekaran was selected based on his “distinguished contributions in the fields of applied algorithms, randomized computing, parallel computing and bioinformatics.” He is the first faculty member from the UConn School of Engineering to receive this distinction and will be formally inducted during the AAAS annual meeting in February 2010.
Dr. Rajasekaran is an expert in the area of applied algorithms, particularly parallel, randomized algorithms and bioinformatics. His work on packet routing is considered to be seminal, and his studies in integer sorting have helped pioneer new methodologies. Dr. Rajasekaran was instrumental in the development of a website tool, the Minimotif Miner (MnM), which allows researchers to search a given protein for hundreds of amino acid motifs that may be associated with diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The tool is used by biologists worldwide.
He is a co-author of two textbooks, Computer Algorithms/C++ (1997) and Computer Algorithms (1998), the Subject Area Editor of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Area Editor of Parallel Processing Letters, and Founder of the International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BICoB). He has published more than 200 research articles in journals and conferences. In addition, Dr. Rajasekaran holds nine U.S. patents, is an elected member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, and is an IEEE Fellow.
His research has spanned a spectrum of applications, including motif search, natural language parsing, large scale modeling and simulations, data mining (identifying patterns and useful information from seemingly unrelated voluminous data), biological sequence analysis, mobile computing, image processing, computational geometry, model checking, learning theory, and message routing in the Internet.
Before joining UConn in 2002, Dr. Rajasekaran was Chief Scientist with Arcot Systems in Santa Clara, CA while on temporary leave from his faculty position as full professor in the Computer & Information Science Department at the University of Florida, Gainesville. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard University in 1988.
