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. He is also a member of the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Institute.
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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Army Lieutenant General Paul T. Stanton, Engr ’11 (PhD) recently assumed the roles of director of DISA and commander of the Joint Force Headquarters-Department of Defense Information Network.
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Outstanding students and faculty were honored at the annual Computer Science Department Awards Ceremony.