Zisman Family Professor of CIS: Rajeev Alur

Dr. Rajeev Alur, professor of computer and information science for the School of Engineering and Applied Science, has been named the inaugural Zisman Family Professor of Computer and Information Science.

Dr. Alur received his bachelor's degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur in 1987, and his doctorate degree in computer science from Stanford University in 1991.

Before joining the Penn faculty in 1997, Dr. Alur spent six years at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, as a member of the technical staff in the Computing Science Research Center.

Dr.  Alur's research focus has been on tools for design, specification, and analysis of reactive systems, and spans from theoretical foundations in formal logic and automata theory to applications in network protocols and embedded controllers. His work on timed and hybrid automata, a framework for the specification and verification of real-time systems, is widely cited and deployed. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Semiconductor Research Corporation.

He has chaired many scientific conferences including the International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification, the International Conference on Embedded Software, and the International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control.

His awards include the President of India's Gold Medal for Academic Excellence (1987), the National Science Foundation's Faculty Career Award (1997), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Faculty Fellowship (1999), and the National Science Foundation's Information Technology Research Award (2001).

The Zisman Family Professorship was established by University Trustee and Penn Engineering Overseer Dr. Michael Zisman GEE'73, WG'77, who is Vice President for Corporate Strategy at IBM.