Raj Acharya

Raj Acharya obtained his Ph.D. from the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine in 1984. Since then, he has worked as a research scientist at the Mayo Clinic and at GE (Thomson)-CGR in Paris, France. He has also been a Faculty Fellow at the Night Vision Laboratory in Fort Belvoir in Washington, D.C. and has been a NASA-ASEE Faculty Fellow at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX. He is currently the Head of Computer Science and Engineering at Penn State. His main research thrusts are in the general area of bioinformatics and biocomputing. He is the architect of the PCABC Cancer Bioinformatics Datawarehouse project. He works on using information fusion techniques for genomics and proteomics. He is also developing fractal models for the DNA replication and transcription sites. He is an associate editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. He is also the co-chair of the IAPR Technical Committee on Pattern Recognition for Bioinformatics. His research work has been featured among others in Businessweek, Mathematics Calendar, The Scientist, Diagnostic Imaging, Biomedical Engineering Newsletter, and Drug Design.

He has initiated 4 Centers of Excellence at Penn State. He has assembled a university-wide multidisciplinary team to secure a NSF Research infrastructure grant. He has initiated multi-nation IT Learning Institute (India, China), which imparts global engineering education to students.

He has recruited 15 new tenure-track faculty and 8 teaching faculty. Since 2001, 8 of the eligible 10 junior faculty have been awarded NSF Career grants. Two junior faculty were awarded the prestigious NSF PECASE award in January 2010 by President Obama.

During his tenure, Penn State CS research expenditure has moved from 64th (2001) to 8th (2008) in the nation. U.S. News & World Report ranks the CE Doctoral program 18th in the country. The CSE Department was awarded the $35.5 Million U.S. Army Network Sciences Center this year.

Research Interests:

Bioinformatics, Data Mining, Netcentric Computing, Information Fusion

Selected Publications:

1. Gosh, D., D. A. Pados, R. Acharya, J. Llinas. 2006. On Dempster-Shafer and Bayesian Detectors. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics 36(5):688-693.
   
2. Tsiligaridis, J., R. Acharya. April 2005. A Tree Based Data Mining Prediction Scheme for Wireless Cellular Networks. Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing (ITCC'05). pp. 784-786. Las Vegas, NV.
   
3. Sarangan, V., D. Ghosh, N. Gautam, R. Acharya. February 2005. Steady-state Distribution for Stochastic Knapsack with Bursty Arrivals. IEEE Communications Letters 9(2):187-189.
   
4. Kasturi, J., R. Acharya. February 2005. An Information Fusion Approach to Combine Sequence and Gene Expression Data. Bioinformatics 21(4):423-429.
   
5. Kasturi, J., R. Acharya, M. Ramanathan. March 2003. An Information Theoretic Approach for Analyzing Temporal Patterns of Gene Expression. Bioinformatics 19(4):449-458.