Professor Vijayakumar Bhagavatula Named Interim Dean at CIT

In an email to the university community, Provost and Executive Vice President Mark S. Kamlet announced that Professor Vijayakumar Bhagavatula will become interim dean of the Carnegie Institute of Technology (CIT), effective Aug. 1.  Bhagavatula takes the helm from Pradeep Khosla who is leaving CMU to become chancellor of the University of California, San Diego. The following is Kamlet's email message.

Dear Members of the University Community:

On behalf of President Jared L. Cohon and myself, I am very pleased to announce that Professor Vijayakumar Bhagavatula will become interim dean of the Carnegie Institute of Technology (CIT), effective Aug. 1. Professor Kumar is a professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) and the associate dean for Graduate and Faculty Affairs at CIT. He is a past associate department head of ECE, and served as acting head of ECE in 2004-05.

An outstanding educator and scholar, Professor Kumar's research interests include pattern recognition, biometrics and coding, and signal processing for data storage systems. He has co-authored the book “Correlation Pattern Recognition,” 15 book chapters and more than 500 technical papers. He served as a Pattern Recognition Topical Editor for the Information Processing Division of “Applied Optics,” and was an associate editor for “IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security” from 2004 to 2009.

Professor Kumar is a member of many biometrics and data storage conference program committees and has been a co-general chair for several conferences and workshops. Most recently, he is a co-chair of the 2012 Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems (BTAS) Conference.

Professor Kumar is a fellow of IEEE, SPIE, the Optical Society of America (OSA) and the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR). He serves on the IEEE Biometric Council and was a former member of IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Technical Committee on Information Forensics and Security.

Professor Kumar has earned several honors at CMU, including the 2003 Eta Kappa Nu Award for Excellence in Teaching in ECE and CIT’s Dowd Fellowship for educational contributions. In 2009, he received the CIT Outstanding Faculty Research Award with Professor Marios Savvides.

I thank Kumar very much for his willingness to serve in this important position during our transition to the next permanent dean of CIT. The college and university will be in very good hands.


Sincerely,

Mark S. Kamlet
Provost and Executive Vice President
Carnegie Mellon University