Pradeep Khosla, New Dean of CIT

Mark Kamlet
Provost

June 9, 2004

Dear Colleagues,

It is with great pleasure and enthusiasm that I announce the appointment of Pradeep K. Khosla, the Philip and Marsha Dowd Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Robotics, as dean of the College of Engineering, effective July 1. He replaces John Anderson, who left in April to become provost at Case Western University.

A member of the CIT faculty since 1986 and an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon, Pradeep has invested enormous energy in the success of this university and demonstrated his leadership in research and education initiatives within Carnegie Mellon and internationally.

He currently is head of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. Pradeep's other leadership positions include being co-director of CyLab, a university-wide computer security research initiative, as well as director of the Information Networking Institute.

Pradeep was a founding director of the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems (ICES), and led the growth of ICES during the period 1997 to 1999 by positioning it in several strategic areas. In 2003 he co-founded (with Rich Pethia) CyLab a university level multidisciplinary research Institute to address technology, policy, and management issues in measurable, available, secure, sustainable, and trustworthy computing and communication systems. We have asked Pradeep to retain his position as Co-Director of CyLab and continue to provide leadership for this important effort.

During his 5-year tenure as department head, ECE grew more than 80% in research volume, hired 22 new faculty, defined several strategic multidisciplinary research initiatives, and increased diversity in both faculty and graduate students. The Computer Engineering graduate program was also ranked number one for the first time by U.S. News and World Report in the 2002 rankings.

Since October 2000, under his leadership the Information Networking Institute (INI) has increased its enrollment from 15 students per class to more than 110 students starting Fall 2004; created a collaboration with the Athens Information Technology (AIT) Institute in Athens, Greece, to offer Carnegie Mellon's MSIN (Master of Science in Information Networking) degree; and defined the multidisciplinary MS in Information Security and Technology management degree (MSISTM).

He is involved in electrical and computer engineering, design, and robotics education both at the graduate and the undergraduate levels. Hewas a member of the committee that formulated a curriculum for the multidisciplinary PhD program in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon. He was also a member of the "Wipe the Slate Clean" Committee that created a new four-year undergraduate ECE degree curriculum at Carnegie Mellon.In support of the new curriculum he proposed the notion of teaching engineering to freshmen and developed the introductory freshman level course "Introduction to Electrical and Computer Engineering" that emphasizes the notion of teaching in context. He is the co-author of a text book and a laboratory manual for this freshman course.

Pradeep received B. Tech (Hons) from IIT (Kharagpur, India), and both M.S. and Ph. D.degrees from Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests are in the areas of collaborating and distributed autonomous robotic systems, software composition and reconfigurable software for real-time embedded systems, and secure embedded software and information systems.

Pradeep has graduated more than 50 MS and PhD students and is the author or co-author of more than 300 publications that include a textbook and a laboratory manual for ECE freshman course. An internationally renowned researcher and educator, he is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Inlaks Foundation Fellowship,the Carnegie Institute of Technology Ladd award for excellence in research, two NASA Tech Brief awards, the ASEE George Westinghouse Award for Education, Siliconindia Leadership award for Excellence in Academics and Technology, and the W. Wallace McDowell award from IEEE Computer Society. He is a Fellow of both, IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and AAAI (American Association of Artificial Intelligence) and currently serves on editorial boards of IEEE Spectrum, and IEEE Security and Privacy.

He is a co-founder of QuantapointInc. -- a high-tech company based in Pittsburgh. In December 2002, he was appointed a member of the IT transition team of Pennsylvania Governor-elect Ed Rendell and in February2003 he was appointed to the National Research Council Board on Manufacturing and Engineering Design for a three-year term. He also serves on advisory boards of several universities and companies including ITU Ventures and Alcoa CIO's advisory board.

Please join me in congratulating Pradeep on this new appointment.

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