<p>Prof. Vivek Sarkar conducts research in multiple aspects of parallel software including programming languages, program analysis, compiler optimizations and runtime systems for parallel and high performance computer systems.  He leads the Habanero Multicore Software Research project at Rice University, and also serves as Associate Director for the multi-university NSF Expeditions Center for Domain-Specific Computing (CDSC). Prior to joining Rice in July 2007, Prof. Sarkar was Senior Manager of Programming Technologies at IBM Research.  His responsibilities at IBM included leading IBM's research efforts in programming model, tools, and productivity in the PERCS project during 2002- 2007 as part of the DARPA High Productivity Computing System program.  His past projects include the X10 programming language, the Jikes Research Virtual Machine for the Java language, the MIT RAW multicore project, the ASTI optimizer used in IBM's XL Fortran product compilers, the PTRAN automatic parallelization system, and profile-directed partitioning and scheduling of Sisal programs.</p><p>Prof. Sarkar holds a B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, an M.S. degree from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University.  He became a member of the IBM Academy of Technology in 1995, the E.D. Butcher Chair in Engineering at Rice University in 2007, and was inducted as an ACM Fellow in 2008.  Prof. Sarkar has been serving as a member of the US Department of Energy's Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee (ASCAC) since 2009.  He become the chair of the Computer Science Department at Rice University in 2013.</p>