Jeffrey Vitter

Education

Vitter was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. He earned a bachelor of science in mathematics with highest honors from the University of Notre Dame in 1977, a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University under the supervision of Donald Knuth in 1980 and a master of business administration from Duke University in 2002.

Career

Vitter was unanimously named as the 17th chancellor of the University of Mississippi by the Mississippi Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning (IHL) on October 29, 2015 and began duties on January 1, 2016.

Previously since 2010, Vitter was provost and executive vice chancellor and Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. As provost, Dr. Vitter was the chief academic and operations officer for the Lawrence and Edwards campuses. He co-chaired the development of the KU strategic plan Bold Aspirations and has overseen the creation of the first-ever university-wide KU Core curriculum, expansion of the Schools of Engineering and Business, boosting multidisciplinary research and funding around four strategic initiatives, major growth of technology commercialization and corporate partnerships, and administrative reorganization and efficiency.

Vitter served at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas as provost and executive vice president for academics from 2008 to 2009, leading the 48,000-student university in the development of the institution’s academic master plan and launching initiatives affecting faculty start-up allocations, multidisciplinary priorities and diversity. He also oversaw A&M’s campus in Doha, Qatar.

From 2002 to 2008, Vitter was the Frederick Hovde Dean of the College of Science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, where he led the development of two strategic plans, establishing a dual focus of excellence in core departments and in multidisciplinary collaborations. He oversaw net growth by roughly 60 faculty members and launched the collaborative design of an innovative outcomes-based college curriculum.

At Duke University in Durham, North Carolina from 1993 to 2002, Vitter held a distinguished professorship as the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor. He chaired the Department of Computer Science for eight and a half years and led it to significant gains in ratings. From 1980 to 1992, he progressed through the faculty ranks in the Department of Computer Science at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He was awarded tenure in 1985 at the age of 29.

Vitter spent sabbatical leaves at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, CA; INRIA in Rocquencourt, France; Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris; Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey; Aarhus University in Aarhus, Denmark, and INRIA in Sophia Antipolis, France.

Academic interests

Vitter is a computer scientist with over 300 books, journals, and conference publications, primarily on the design and mathematical analysis of algorithms dealing with big data. His Google Scholar h-index is in the 70s, and he is an ISI highly cited researcher. He helped establish the field of out-of-core algorithms (a.k.a. "external memory algorithms") as a rigorous area of active investigation. He has also made fundamental contributions in databases; compressed data structures and indexing; data compression, including adaptive Huffman coding, arithmetic coding, image compression, and video compression; hashing and search data structures; randomized algorithms; sampling and random variate generation; prediction and machine learning; and average-case complexity.

Honors and awards

Vitter is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (2009), a Fulbright Scholar (1998), a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) (1996), a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) (1993), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow (1986), a National Science Foundation (NSF) Presidential Young Investigator Awardee (1985), and a member of Sigma Xi (1983) and Phi Beta Kappa (1977).

Advisory roles

Vitter serves or has served on several advisory boards and boards of directors, including at the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate, the Center for Massive Data Algorithmics at Aarhus University, the School of Science and Engineering at Tulane University, the University of Mississippi Foundation, the University of Mississippi Research Foundation, Innovate Mississippi, and the Computing Research Association, where he continues as co-chair of its Government Affairs Committee. He serves on the oversight board of the Personalized Learning Consortium of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and has chaired the APLU Council on Academic Affairs. He has chaired the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (ACM SIGACT).

Personal

Vitter and his wife Sharon have three children: Jillian, J. Scott Jr. and Audrey. He is a brother of former U.S. Senator David Vitter of Louisiana and, as a hobby, is the family genealogist.