• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Texas A&M University
• M.S. in Computer Science, University of Delaware
• B.S. in Computer Science (Summa Cum Laude), University of Indianapolis

Damian Dechev is Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Houston. Prior to joining UH in August 2026, he was a professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida.

Dechev’s research spans distributed systems, programming languages, concurrency and verification, with applications in high-performance computing and scalable artificial intelligence infrastructure. He earned his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University under the guidance of Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of the C++ programming language. He has advised and graduated 10 Ph.D. students, whose careers have included positions at leading technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Meta.

Dechev has served as principal investigator on numerous research projects funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. Before entering academia, he held research positions at Sandia National Laboratories and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

From 2021 to 2025, Dechev served as a program director in the NSF’s Division of Computing and Communication Foundations. In this role, he provided national leadership for research programs in scalable systems and formal methods, helped launch new NSF-DOE initiatives and supported the development of international research collaborations. His contributions to the agency were recognized with NSF Director’s Awards for Superior Accomplishment in 2023 and 2024.

• NSF Director’s Award for Superior Accomplishment 2024
• UCF CECS College Excellence in Professional Service Award 2024
• NSF Director’s Award for Superior Accomplishment 2023
• Outstanding Paper Award, ACM SPAA 2016
  

• Z. Painter, D. Dechev. "Blockchain Scalability with Proof of Descriptor." ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice, 2025.
• K. Lamar, B. Allan, S. Swan, J. Brandt, D. Dechev. "Predicting HPC Job Run Time with Realistic Data Using Application Input Parameters." IEEE HPEC, 2025.
• V. Cook, C. Peterson, Z. Painter, D. Dechev. "Quantifiability: A Concurrent Correctness Condition Modeled in Vector Space." Springer Computing, 2022.
• C. Peterson, V. Cook, D. Dechev. "Concurrent Correctness in Vector Space." 22nd International Conference on Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation (VMCAI), 2021.
• R. Izadpanah, C. Peterson, Y. Solihin, D. Dechev. "PETRA: Persistent Transactional Non-blocking Linked Data Structures." ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization, 2021.