Jignesh M. Patel
Jignesh M. Patel is a computer scientist and entrepreneur whose research repeatedly moves from his lab into commercial data products and whose leadership is helping modernize computing education and advance innovation through partnerships.
Patel is a faculty member in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science and has served as interim head of its Computer Science Department since 2025. He joined CMU in 2023 after appointments at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Michigan.
His research spans scalable algorithms for efficient data systems and natural language interfaces for data analysis. It has been supported by several federal agencies, including NSF, NIH, DARPA and DHS, as well as by the Semiconductor Research Corporation and leading technology companies, including Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Samsung and Snowflake. Patel is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He received teaching honors at both Michigan and Wisconsin, including the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering Education Excellence Award and Wisconsin Computer Science Department’s Student Choice Professor of the Year Award.
Patel co-founded four companies that were subsequently acquired, including one by Twitter in 2013 that was integrated into Twitter’s global real-time streaming platform. He helped build the University of Wisconsin’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, co-founding and co-leading with the Wisconsin School of Business a statewide global venture-accelerator program for science- and technology-based startups. He also founded a computer science entrepreneurship competition and served on the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation's Entrepreneurship and Innovation Committee.
At Carnegie Mellon, he has focused on modernizing the undergraduate computing curriculum to strengthen foundational problem-solving skills and promote responsible use of artificial intelligence.
He holds a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi, and master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.