Gopal Pandurangan Joins Computer Science Faculty
Area of Expertise: Algorithms, Distributed Computing, Networks and Large-Scale Data

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Gopal Pandurangan to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Houston. He will join the department as an associate professor at the start of fall 2014.

Gopal received his Ph.D. from Brown University, his M.S. from SUNY at Albany, and his B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He has held faculty and visiting positions at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Brown University, Purdue University and Rutgers University.

A Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Gopal has published more than 75 refereed research papers in the areas of theory and algorithms, distributed computing, networks and computational biology. His work has appeared in JACM, SICOMP, ACM TALG, STOC, FOCS, SODA, PODC, SPAA, INFOCOM, and RECOMB. He has supervised and graduated three Ph.D. students and mentored and worked with several other Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows.

Gopal’s addition enhances the department’s growing research strengths in algorithms and theory, distributed and parallel computing, networks and big data. A main focus of his research is on understanding the theoretical foundations and algorithmic aspects of distributed computing, networked computation, and large-scale data.

In particular, he has conducted research in randomized algorithms, distributed and parallel algorithms, graph algorithms, distributed processing of large-scale data, communication networks (algorithms for dynamic networks, self-* networks, peer-to-peer networks, ad hoc wireless and sensor networks), real-world networks (structural, modeling, and algorithmic aspects of Internet, World Wide Web, and social networks), bioinformatics and computational biology (algorithms for biological networks and protein structure related problems).

“Distributed computing and networked computation are now at the forefront of computing with the paradigm shift from single-processor computing to multiprocessor and multiagent computing,” Gopal said. “The rise of the Internet and large-scale networks, as well as data center, cloud computing, and multicore computing, necessitates new research in the foundations of distributed computing and large-scale networks and data. This is vital to the design of new, efficient, and robust algorithms that can work and scale to a large number machines and huge amount of data. I am excited to be working on new algorithmic and foundational problems that are thrown up by these emerging applications.”

Gopal is looking forward to collaborating with faculty and students in algorithmic problems arising in areas of his interests, including distributed and parallel computing, networking, and big data applications.