From 2002 to 2008, Dr. Vitter served as the Frederick L. Hovde Dean of the College of Science and Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. As dean, he was the chief academic officer and administrator of the College of Science. In approximate terms, the College of Science comprised 325 faculty members, 550 staff members, 1,000 graduate students, and 2,800 undergraduate majors, with a total annual budget of $130 million. The courses offered by the College accounted for about one-fourth of the University's 1 million student credit hours. Dr. Vitter was responsible for overseeing the discovery, learning, engagement, and diversity activities of the College of Science's seven academic departments: Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, Mathematics, Physics, and Statistics. Dr. Vitter led the collaborative development of two strategic plans for the College, which established a dual focus of excellence in the core departments as well as in multidisciplinary collaborations. The College grew by 60 faculty members during his tenure, several hired under the innovative COALESCE faculty hiring program targeting College-wide priorities. He also launched a comprehensive study of the undergraduate program, which resulted in an innovative outcomes-based College curriculum approved by the faculty and implemented in 2007. Several programs in the College are ranked among the very best nationally.
From 1993 to 2002, Dr. Vitter held a distinguished professorship at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where he was the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of Computer Science. 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. As chair, he led the Department to significant improvements in stature -- characterized by a top-20 ranking, stellar faculty hires, dynamic strategic plans, a departmental culture of inclusiveness, comprehensive curriculum redesign, administrative reorganization, substantial increases in both the undergraduate and graduate programs, creation of a successful Industry Partners Program, and a rise in sponsored research expenditures to 250% of initial level. Previously from 1980-1993, he progressed through the faculty ranks and served in various leadership roles 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 home town is New Orleans, Louisiana (as everyone who knows him knows!).
Dr. Vitter is a member of the Board of Advisors for the School of Science and Engineering at Tulane University in New Orleans and the visiting committee of the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA) in France. From 2000-2009, Dr. Vitter served on the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA), where he continues to co-chair the 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 European Association for Theoretical Computer Science, as well as on various review committees. Sabbatical sites have included 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 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 280 book, journal, conference, and patent publications reflecting his research interests described below. His Google Scholar h-index is 55. His book Algorithms and Data Structures for External Memory (now Publishers, 2008) covers the I/O algorithms 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 is coeditor of the collections External Memory Algorithms and Algorithm Engineering. His editorial board memberships have included Algorithmica, Communications of the ACM, IEEE Transactions on Computers, Theory of Computing Systems (formerly Mathematical Systems Theory: An International Journal on Mathematical Computing Theory), and SIAM Journal on Computing; in addition, he has edited several special issues. He has consulted widely and is co-holder of patents in the areas of external sorting, parallel I/O, prediction, and approximate data structures. He proposed the concept and participated in the design of what has become the Purdue University Research Expertise database (PURE) and the Indiana Database for University Research Expertise (INDURE), www.indure.org.