Sitaraman Appointed Distinguished Professor
Ramesh Sitaraman of the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) was appointed Distinguished Professor by the UMass Board of Trustees at its June 2 meeting. The title Distinguished Professor is conferred on select, highly accomplished faculty who have already achieved the rank of professor and meet a demanding set of qualifications.
In her letter of nomination, Laura Haas, dean of CICS, highlights Sitaraman’s research and teaching contributions, as well as his sustained impact on his field of study. “Professor Sitaraman is a world-class leader in distributed networks and the expert…in content delivery networks. [He] has an exemplary record and is clearly at the level that we associate with the rank of Distinguished Professor,” says Haas, noting Sitaraman’s widely cited publications and patents.
Sitaraman is known for pioneering content delivery networks (CDNs) and the edge computing services that currently deliver much of the world’s web, videos, applications, and online services. His research has attracted millions of dollars of funding from the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Google, VMware, and Amazon.
In addition to his research, Sitaraman has received an Outstanding Teaching Award from the College of Natural Sciences, as well as the UMass Amherst Distinguished Teaching Award, the university’s highest recognition of teaching. “Sitaraman’s teaching is exemplary,” says Haas. “Since his arrival at UMass, Sitaraman has taught a generation of students to think algorithmically. Many of his students are now key members of academia and industry who remember his teaching and mentoring as being highly impactful in their careers.”
Sitaraman is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE. He is a recipient of the inaugural ACM SIGCOMM Networking Systems for his work on the Akamai network, the world's first major CDN, and a recipient of an Excellence in DASH Award for his work on adaptive bitrate algorithms that are now widely used by major video streaming providers such as Amazon. He also actively works to facilitate interactions between industry and academia, recently leading an effort to develop an edge computing center of excellence jointly with industry partners.
The founding director of the informatics program at CICS, Sitaraman also serves as director of the Laboratory for Internet-Scale Distributed Systems Laboratory (LIDS). He received his doctorate from Princeton University and subsequently joined the UMass Amherst faculty.