Dr. Arcot Rajasekar is a Professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and a Chief Scientist at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). Previously he was at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, leading the Data Grids Technology Group.
In NEXUS, Dr. Rajasekar leads the NEXUS Geospatial Hub in collaboration with NEXUS MPI Rima Habre, PhD, of the University of University of Southern California. The NEXUS Geospatial Hub aims to pioneer innovative methods to examine how social and environmental factors influence health by developing a scalable geospatial data framework that enables researchers and public health officials to connect place-based exposures in the external environment with health outcomes at both the population and individual levels.
Dr. Rajasekar has been involved in research and development of data grid middleware systems for over a decade and is a lead originator behind the concepts in the Storage Resource Broker (SRB) and the integrated Rule Oriented Data Systems (iRODS), two premier data grid middleware developed by the Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) Group.
A leading proponent of policy-oriented, large-scale data management, Dr. Rajasekar has several research projects funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Archives, National Institute of Health and other federal agencies. He has more than 150 publications in the areas of data grids, digital library, persistent archives, logic programming, and artificial intelligence. His latest projects involve applying data modeling and mining for PFAS data, using generative AI for enabling data discovery for neuro-imaging datasets and developing data workbench for exposomics.
Fun Fact: Dr. Rajasekar is an avid but discerning numismatist. He collects many of the modern mint commemorative coins (do you know that the America the Beautiful Quarters series honored more than 50 national parks and sites in the United States?) He is particularly interested in Colonial coinage and also collects Byzantine emperor Justinian II’s coins.
Learn more: https://datascience.unc.edu/person/arcot-rajasekar/