Purdue University
Mathematical Sciences Building
150 N. University Street
West Lafayette, IN 47907-2067 USA
http://www.science.purdue.edu/jsv/
Email: ScienceDean @ purdue.edu
Phone: (765) 494-1730
FAX: (765) 494-1736
Asst: Ms. Jennie Jones
Jeff Vitter serves as the Frederick L. Hovde Dean of the College of Science and Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. As dean, he is the chief academic officer and administrator of the College of Science. In approximate terms, the College of Science comprises 325 faculty members, 550 staff members, 1,000 graduate students, and 2,800 undergraduate majors, with a total annual budget of $130 million. The courses offered by the College account for about one-fourth of the University's 1 million student credit hours. Dean Vitter is responsible for overseeing the discovery, learning, and engagement activities of the College's seven academic departments: Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, Mathematics, Physics, and Statistics. National rankings for departments and programs include analytical chemistry (#2), information technology/information systems (CERIAS) (#2), computational science (#5), computer science (#9 and #19), statistics (#10), computer systems (#16), software engineering (#17), programming languages (#18), applied mathematics (#19), chemistry (#22), mathematics (#26), physics (#35), biological sciences (#42), and earth science (#43). In addition, the groups in structural biology and information security are internationally renowned.
The College of Science has primary oversight over the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS), one of the world's leading centers in information security. CERIAS involves faculty from six colleges on campus, and it trains one-fourth of all the information security PhDs in the country. The College of Science is a strategic partner with fellow colleges at Purdue in several other University centers, including the Purdue Climate Change Research Center (PCCRC), the Center for Structural Biology, the Center for Sensing Science and Technology (CSST), the Computing Research Institute (CRI), the Center for Research and Engagement in Science and Mathematics Education (CRESME), and the I-STEM educational resource network, as well as the 10 centers in Discovery Park, Purdue's hub of interdisciplinary centers.
Dean Vitter has reorganized the dean's office into a proactive team of talented associate deans and directors with targeted areas of responsibility in academic affairs, research, undergraduate education, graduate education, diversity, international programs, advancement, corporate relations, advising, recruiting, K-12 outreach, and information technology. He initiated the annual faculty and staff awards ceremony to recognize individuals for their dedication and excellence in advising, mentoring, engagement, leadership, and multidisciplinary initiatives, as well for years of service. The offices of diversity and K-12 outreach play important engagement roles in improving educational opportunities and building pathways to higher education. Programs include diversity awareness training, leadership development, recruitment of faculty role models, mentoring, and improving the overall environment. The K-12 outreach group has directly impacted over a half million students and 7,000 teachers in Indiana, and it has conducted more than 2,600 school visits.
Dean Vitter formed an undergraduate education task force to undertake the first comprehensive review of the College curriculum since its formation over 40 years ago; the goal was to ensure that all science students are well prepared as lifelong learners for successful and productive careers. With broad College-wide participation and working with the Undergraduate Education Policy and Curriculum Committee, the task force identified six key educational outcomes and designed an innovative and flexible curriculum and a set of experiences to meet them. After a successful pilot for selected undergraduate programs, the full curriculum was approved by the College faculty in April 2007 and went into effect for the 2007-2008 academic year. More than half of science students currently graduate with research or internship experience, and their participation in study abroad has more than doubled in the last three years. The new curriculum has incentives for further growth of these important experiences.
The College of Science recently celebrated its centennial—100 years of imagination and innovation—and is working toward worldwide impact during its next 100 years. To help marshal needed resources, Dean Vitter has created a comprehensive office for advancement and strategic relations to coordinate fundraising, corporate relations, alumni and donor relations, and communications. The College has recently opened the beautiful $22 million Lawson Computer Science Building and is working to complete the campaign for the $33 million Hockmeyer Structural Biology Building. In addition, science faculty are involved in several new buildings coming online in Discovery Park. In corporate relations, the College has inaugurated a vibrant Science Business Partners Program, which provides corporations a common portal for mutually beneficial interactions in the College and across campus. One good example is the Geo-Mathematical Imaging Group, a consortium of major energy companies working with leading scientists across campus. The College of Science's new magazine Insights and monthly e-newsletter Science@Purdue reflect our consistent message that Purdue science is making a real difference for Indiana and our global society.
Dean Vitter leads the College in its strategic planning and assessment. The College's 2003-2008 strategic plan provides the framework and direction for the College to reach and sustain preeminence through a dynamic process of improvement and evaluation. The College is actively growing its number of tenure-track faculty by 20% and has instituted a research faculty track. It has developed ways to recruit faculty and staff more effectively and at the same time to increase diversity by means of building large and diverse candidate pools, improving filtering mechanisms, and identifying traits that lead to excellence. At the heart of the vision is a dual philosophy of advancing multidisciplinary collaborations as well as excellence in the core disciplines. Through a bottom-up process, the faculty identified seven multidisciplinary priorities that coalesce important contributions from multiple disciplines in the College and University to explore profound societal challenges. These seven ``COALESCE I'' areas are complemented by core excellence in the seven departments, including world-renowned programs in structural biology, analytical chemistry, statistics, computer science, information security, and applied mathematics.
In 2007, as part of the COALESCE II initiative, the College hiring priorities committee (CHPC) collected vision papers and met with colleagues across campus, culminating in an all-day College-wide retreat on May 9, 2007 devoted to discussion and vetting of these vision papers. Part of the plan is already taking effect: In September 2007, the College allocated a number of multidisciplinary faculty positions, including joint searches with six other colleges, to complement and leverage cooperative hiring plans developed by science departments and by others across campus.
In January 2008, the College officially kicked off its current strategic planning effort. Much preparation work was done the preceding year, including the multdisciplinary planning process led by the CHPC; extensive surveys of faculty, staff, undergraduate students, and graduate students; and focus groups of key constituencies such as the Dean's Leadership Council, alumni, and high school teachers. A steering committee and four Pillar groups—on discovery, learning, engagement, and diversity—are leading the discussions. The College hosted campus-wide town hall meetings in April 2007 for further midcourse input. The strategic plan will be completed in Fall 2008.
From 1993 to 2002, Dean Vitter was the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of Computer Science in the College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He served as Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Duke from 1993-2001 and as Co-Director and a Founding Member of Duke's Center for Geometric and Biological Computing from 1997-2002. As chair, he led the Department to significant improvements in stature—characterized by a top-20 ranking, stellar faculty hires, a dynamic strategic plan, a departmental culture of inclusiveness, comprehensive curriculum redesign, administrative reorganization, substantial increases in both the undergraduate and graduate programs, creation of a successful industry partners program, and a rise in sponsored research expenditures to 250% of initial level. Previously from 1980-1993, he progressed through the faculty ranks and served in various leadership roles at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. His educational degrees include a B.S. with highest honors in Mathematics in 1977 from the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana; a Ph.D.in Computer Science under Don Knuth in 1980 from Stanford University in Stanford, California; and an M.B.A. in 2002 from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. His home town is New Orleans, Louisiana (as everyone who knows him knows!).
Dean Vitter serves on the board of directors of the Computing Research Association, where he co-chairs the government affairs committee. He is a member of the board of advisors for the School of Science and Engineering at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he previously served as adjunct faculty member. He has served as chair of ACM SIGACT, the Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory of the world's largest computer professional organization, the Association for Computing Machinery. He has served on the executive council of the EATCS (European Association for Theoretical Computer Science), as well as on various review committees. Sabbatical sites have included Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley; Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (I.N.R.I.A.) in Rocquencourt, France; Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris; Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey; and I.N.R.I.A. in Sophia Antipolis, France.
Dean Vitter has been named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator, a Fulbright Scholar, and an IBM Faculty Development Awardee. He has over 250 book, journal, and conference publications reflecting the areas of interest described in his research summary; his Google Scholar h-index is 47. He is coauthor of the books Algorithms and Data Structures for External Memory (now Publishers, in press), Efficient Algorithms for MPEG Video Compression (Wiley & Sons), and Design and Analysis of Coalesced Hashing (Oxford University Press), coeditor of the collections External Memory Algorithms and Algorithm Engineering, and co-holder of patents in the areas of external sorting, parallel I/O, prediction, and approximate data structures. Editorial board memberships have included Algorithmica, Communications of the ACM, IEEE Transactions on Computers, Theory of Computing Systems (formerly Mathematical Systems Theory: An International Journal on Mathematical Computing Theory), and SIAM Journal on Computing; in addition, he has edited several special issues.
One theme in Dean Vitter's research and teaching is how to alleviate the I/O bottleneck between fast internal memory and slow external storage (such as disk) that can occur when processing massive data sets. He is credited as a pioneer in the field of external memory algorithms. He has worked on efficient external memory algorithms in several domains, including geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial databases, sorting, text and string indexing, matrix computations, graph traversal, range search, data mining, and a variety of computational geometry and combinatorial problems. A related interest is how to take advantage of parallel disks or parallel hierarchical memories, in which communication with each parallel memory device can occur simultaneously. He is involved in algorithm engineering using the TPIE (Transparent Parallel I/O programming Environment). Another aspect of Dean Vitter's work involves novel machine learning and prediction mechanisms based upon data compression and locality, using the principle that the more compressible a sequence is, the more predictable it is. Examples include algorithms for caching, prefetching, data streams, database query optimization, data mining, and resource management in mobile computers. He has worked on efficient approaches to image, video, and text compression. He currently works on compressed data structures for searching, where the goal is to use a small amount of space equal to the entropy of the input data, yet still achieve fast search time. Previously, fast data structures for text indexing (such as suffix trees and suffix arrays) required several times more space than the data being indexed! Other interests include randomized, parallel, and incremental algorithms for computational geometry, graphics, random sampling, and random variate generation.
Several of Dean Vitter's recent publications, including a book on external memory algorithms and a book on efficient algorithms for MPEG video compression, are available electronically via his online publication library. Alternatively, they're available via anonymous ftp at ftp.cs.duke.edu in directory pub/jsv/Papers. The full list of his publications appears in his curriculum vitæ.