October 7, 2022
The fall semester of the 2022-2023 academic year is the first in a new chapter for the UNC Department of Computer Science. William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor Samarjit Chakraborty was appointed department chair on July 1.
Bringing a variety of experience from Asia and Europe in addition to his time spent at Carolina, Samarjit looks forward to working with leadership from the College of Arts & Sciences, industry professionals, alumni, and other departments on campus to build on the department’s long track record of innovative research and education.
Chakraborty joined the department in 2019 from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in Germany, where he held the Chair for Real-Time Systems. From 2011 to 2016, he led a research program on embedded systems for electric vehicles at the TUM CREATE Center for Electromobility in Singapore. His career in academia spans three continents.
Chakraborty’s research interests span the areas of real-time, embedded, and cyber-physical systems design. He received the ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS) 2021 Best Paper Award for his paper on energy modeling for the Bluetooth Low Energy protocol. His work on smartphone-based electronic contact tracing for COVID-19 was featured on the cover of Communications of the ACM in January 2022.
Chakraborty received a doctorate from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland in 2003. His dissertation earned him the ETH Medal and the European Design and Automation Association’s Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award.
He regularly serves on technical programming committees for various conferences on real-time and embedded systems, including chairing Embedded Systems Week (ESWeek) in 2011, the International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT) in 2009, and the International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (SIES) in 2012. From 2013 to 2014, he served on the executive committee of the Design and Automation Conference (DAC), where he started a new track on automotive systems and software alongside Ford Motor Company.
Gillian T. Cell Distinguished Professor Kevin Jeffay served as department chair for the past eight years. Jeffay’s leadership navigated the department through many opportunities and challenges, including an unprecedented increase in undergraduate enrollment, the sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the department’s role in the launch of Carolina’s School of Data Science and Society. These challenges and others led Jeffay to extend his term as chair longer than originally anticipated, and the department is extremely grateful for his leadership and dedication.