Randal Burns is the Bill and Lisa Stromberg Head of the Department of Computer Science in the Whiting School of Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University.
His research has pushed the scalability limits of data science based on emergent storage technologies; this has ranged from engineering file systems for storage area networks in the 1990s, building scientific web services on scale-out cloud storage in the 2000s, and developing graph and sparse-matrix engines for machine learning in the 2010s and ’20s. His work has been inspired by high-throughput science, including numerical simulations for turbulence and neuroscience microscopy.
Burns is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award and was a U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Principal Investigator. A fellow of the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute, he was also a member of Defense Science Study Group’s 2012–2013 class and served as a member of DARPA’s Information Science and Technology Study Group from 2020 to 2024. He currently serves on Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium Council.
Burns earned a BS in geophysics at Stanford University in 1993 and a PhD in computer science from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2000. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, he was a research staff member at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, where he won an Outstanding Innovation Award.
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Outstanding students and faculty were honored at the annual Computer Science Department Awards Ceremony.