After 50 years in its Department of Computer Science, S. Rao Kosaraju has retired from the Johns Hopkins University and has been appointed as the Edward J. Schaefer Professor Emeritus.
Kosaraju earned his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in 1969; that same year, he joined Johns Hopkins as faculty member. In 1987, he was appointed as the Edward J. Schaefer Professor in Engineering., and from 2014 to 2018, he served as the division director of the NSF’s Division of Computing and Communication Foundations in the Directorate of Computer and Information Science and Engineering on assignment from Johns Hopkins.
Kosaraju won the William H. Huggins Excellence in Teaching Award from the Whiting School of Engineering in 1992; the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association’s Excellence in Teaching Awards in 1999 and 2001; and the Robert B. Pond, Sr. Excellence in Teaching Award in 2009. In 2000, he received a Distinguished Service Award from the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory for his outstanding service to the theoretical computer science community.
A Fellow of both the ACM and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Kosaraju was the chair of the ACM Fellows selection committee in 1997. He has served on the editorial boards of many prominent journals and was the managing editor of the SIAM Journal on Computing from 1980 to 1988. He has also served on the advisory and external committees of many computer science departments.
“Rao has been a thought leader in theoretical computer science for over 50 years and has built a legacy of prominent contributions to the field of algorithms in diverse areas such as universal graphs, pattern matching, and derandomization,” says Randal Burns, the head of the Department of Computer Science. “In turn, he has imparted this knowledge to generations of Hopkins undergraduate and graduate students.”
The department is deeply indebted to Kosaraju for his 50 years of scholarship, leadership, and service in the field of computer science at the Johns Hopkins University.