Jeff Vitter is the 17th chancellor of the University of Mississippi and also holds the academic title of Distinguished Professor of Computer and Information Science. Previously he served 5.5 years as provost and executive vice chancellor at the University of Kansas, where he was the chief academic officer and chief operations officer for the main campus in Lawrence, KS and branch campus in Overland Park. He was also a professor at KU in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and in the Information and Telecommunication Technology Center. Before going to KU, he was on the faculty at Texas A&M University, where from 2008–2009 he served as provost and executive vice president for academics, with additional responsibilities for overseeing the academic mission of Texas A&M University in Doha, Qatar. From 2002–2008, Dr. Vitter served as the Frederick L. Hovde Dean of the College of Science and Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. From 1993–2002, Dr. Vitter held a distinguished professorship at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where he was the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor. He served at Duke as chair of the Department of Computer Science in the College of Arts and Sciences from 1993–2001 and as co-director and a founding member of Duke's Center for Geometric and Biological Computing from 1997–2002. From 1980–1992, he progressed through the faculty ranks and served in various leadership roles in the Department of Computer Science 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 hometown is New Orleans, Louisiana (as everyone who knows him knows!). He and his wife Sharon have three children.
Dr. Vitter serves on the Advisory Committee of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering. He chaired the executive committee of the Council on Academic Affairs of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and served on committees for the Association of American Universities (AAU). He was on the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association, and he co-chairs its Government Affairs Committee. 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 visiting and review committees. Sabbatical sites have included the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley; INRIA in Rocquencourt, France; Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris; Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey; and INRIA in Sophia Antipolis, France.
Dr. Vitter has been named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator, a Fulbright Scholar, and an IBM Faculty Development Awardee. He has over 300 book, journal, conference, and patent publications and has given more than 200 invited professional presentations worldwide. His Google Scholar h-index is over 65, and he is an ISI highly cited researcher. His book Algorithms and Data Structures for External Memory (Now Publishers, 2008) covers the field that he helped found. He coauthored the books Efficient Algorithms for MPEG Video Compression (Wiley & Sons, 2002) and Design and Analysis of Coalesced Hashing (Oxford University Press, 1987). He co-edited External Memory Algorithms, Algorithm Engineering, and Academic Leadership in Higher Education: From the Top-down and the Bottom-up. His editorial board memberships have included Algorithmica, Communications of the ACM, IEEE Transactions on Computers, PeerJ Computer Science, Theory of Computing Systems, and SIAM Journal on Computing. He edited several special issues and serves on the steering committee of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and advisory board of PeerJ Computer Science. He has consulted widely and co-holds patents in the areas of external sorting, parallel I/O, prediction, and approximate data structures. He proposed the concept and helped design what became the Purdue University Research Expertise database (PURE) and the Indiana Database for University Research Expertise (INDURE), www.indure.org.
