Professor S. Rao Kosaraju has retired from JHU after 50 years of service with the department and has been appointed Edward J. Schaefer Professor Emeritus.
In 1969, Kosaraju earned his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania. During that same year, he became a faculty member at Johns Hopkins. In 1987 he was appointed Edward J. Schaefer Professor in Engineering. He has served on the editorial boards of many prominent journals, including a period as the managing editor of the SIAM Journal on Computing from 1980-88. He has also served on the advisory and external committees of many computer science departments. He was the chair of the ACM Fellows Selection committee in 1997.
Kosaraju won the William H. Huggins Excellence in Teaching Award from the Whiting School of Engineering in 1992 and an Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Awards in 1999 and 2001. In 2000, he received the Association for Computing Machinery SIGACT Distinguished Service Award for outstanding service to the theoretical computer science community. He is a fellow of ACM and IEEE.
Kosaraju served as the division director of the Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF), Director of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) of the National Science Foundation (NSF), from January 2014 –18.
“Kosaraju has been a thought leader in theoretical computer science for over 50 years. He has built a legacy of prominent contributions to the field of algorithms in diverse areas, such as universal graphs, pattern matching, and derandomization,” said Randal Burns, Head, Computer Science. “He has imparted this knowledge to generations of Hopkins undergraduate and graduate students.”
The Computer Science Department is deeply indebted to Rao for his 50 years of scholarship, leadership, and service in the field of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. His commitment and accomplishments are an inspiration to us all.