Biography

Bio • Research • Publications • Vita • Awards • Experience • Service • Personal • Galleries

Jeff Vitter is the provost and executive vice chancellor and the Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas. His academic home is the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and he is a member of the Information and Telecommunication Technology Center. KU comprises roughly 2,450 faculty members, 5,500 staff, 30,000 students, and an annual budget of $1 billion, and it serves the main campus in Lawrence (with 10 colleges and schools), the Edwards campus in Overland Park, Kansas, and the Medical Center campuses in Kansas City, Wichita, and Salina, Kansas. As provost, Dr. Vitter is the chief academic and operations officer for the Lawrence and Edwards campuses. He oversees strategic planning and implementation, which focus on excellence in four important areas: energizing the educational environment, elevating doctoral education, driving discovery and innovation, and engaging scholarship for public impact. Key enablers include developing synergy, people, diversity, external support, efficiency, and infrastructure.

Previously Dr. Vitter was on the faculty in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. From 2008–2009, he served at Texas A&M as provost and executive vice president for academics. where he had the responsibility of chief academic officer for a university of roughly 2,700 faculty members, 5,500 staff, 48,000 students, and an annual budget of $1.2 billion, comprising 10 colleges and schools. He also oversaw the academic mission of Texas A&M University in Doha, Qatar. In collaboration with deans and faculty, Dr. Vitter successfully launched a number of important recruiting efforts and far-reaching initiatives, including those dealing with faculty start-up allocations, multidisciplinary priorities, balanced scorecard reviews and recognition, and diversity. Most significantly, he initiated and led the campus-wide development of the Academic Master Plan.

From 2002–2008, Dr. Vitter served as the Frederick L. Hovde Dean of the College of Science and Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. As dean, he was the chief academic officer and administrator of the College of Science, responsible for overseeing the discovery, learning, engagement, and diversity activities of the college's seven academic departments. In approximate terms, the college comprised 325 faculty, 550 staff, 1,000 graduate students, and 2,800 undergraduate majors, with an annual budget of $130 million. College courses accounted for about a quarter of the university's 1 million student credit hours. Dr. Vitter led the collaborative development of two college strategic plans, which established a dual focus of excellence in the core departments as well as in multidisciplinary collaborations. The college grew by two major new buildings (CS, SB) and 60 faculty members, several hired under the innovative COALESCE faculty program targeting college-wide priorities. He launched a comprehensive college-wide study of the undergraduate program, which resulted in an innovative outcomes-based college curriculum approved by the faculty and implemented in 2007. He proposed and collaboratively piloted the LEAD initiative for student diversity awareness, subsequently adopted by the university. He initiated the Science Business Partners Program and nurtured many successful funding efforts. Several programs in the college are ranked nationally. A summary of Dr. Vitter's strategic initiatives and accomplishments can be found in his expanded Purdue biography.

From 1993–2002, Dr. Vitter held a distinguished professorship at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where he was the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor. He served at Duke as chair of the Department of Computer Science in the College of Arts and Sciences 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 collaboratively led the department to significant improvements in stature — characterized by a top-20 ranking, stellar faculty hires, dynamic strategic plans, a departmental culture of inclusiveness, curriculum redesign, administrative reorganization, substantial increases in both the undergraduate and graduate programs, creation of a successful industry partners program, and rise in sponsored research expenditures to 250% of previous level. From 1980–1992, he progressed through the faculty ranks and served in various leadership roles in the Department of Computer Science 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 hometown is New Orleans, Louisiana (as everyone who knows him knows!). He and his wife Sharon (née Weaver, KU Pharmacy '78) have three children.

Dr. Vitter serves on the Board of Advisors for the School of Science and Engineering at Tulane University in New Orleans. From 2000–2009, Dr. Vitter served on the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA), where he continues to co-chair the Government Affairs Committee. 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 visiting and review committees. Sabbatical sites have included the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley; INRIA in Rocquencourt, France; Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris; Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey; and INRIA in Sophia Antipolis, France.

Dr. Vitter has been named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator, a Fulbright Scholar, and an IBM Faculty Development Awardee. He has over 280 book, journal, conference, and patent publications reflecting his research interests. His Google Scholar h-index is 60, and he is an ISI highly cited researcher. His book Algorithms and Data Structures for External Memory (Now Publishers, 2008) covers the I/O field that he helped found. He coauthored the books Efficient Algorithms for MPEG Video Compression (Wiley & Sons, 2002) and Design and Analysis of Coalesced Hashing (Oxford University Press, 1987). He is coeditor of the collections External Memory Algorithms and Algorithm Engineering. His 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 and serves on the steering committee of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. He has consulted widely and is co-holder of patents in the areas of external sorting, parallel I/O, prediction, and approximate data structures. He proposed the concept and participated in the design of what has become the Purdue University Research Expertise database (PURE) and the Indiana Database for University Research Expertise (INDURE), www.indure.org.

Online Publication Library

Several of Dr. Vitter's more recent publications reflecting his research interests are available to download electronically via his online publication library.