Madhav Marathe, deputy director of Virginia Bioinformatics Institute’s Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory and a professor of computer science with the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, has been chosen as an Association for Computing Machinery Fellow for his contributions to high-performance computing algorithms and software environments for simulating and analyzing socio-technical systems. 

ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, promoting policies and research that enrich professional development and benefit society.

The honor of fellowship recognizes the organization's top 1 percent of its membership and their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology, as well their service to the broader computing community. 

In addition, Marathe was recently named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for his contributions to the development of formal models and software tools for understanding socio-technical networks.

“Madhav has made fundamental contributions to the modeling and analysis of socio-technical systems, through network and dynamical systems approaches for modeling them, and high-performance computing tools for analyzing them," said Anil Vullikanti, an associate professor computer science and member of Virginia Bioinformatics Institute. "These contributions will provide new tools for researchers in different domains, in addition to opening up new research areas within computer science.”

Marathe is an expert in interaction-based modeling and the simulation of large, complex biological, information, social, and technical systems. He leads the basic and applied research program at Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory where researchers are advancing the science and engineering of co-evolving complex networks and developing innovative computational tools based on these advances to support policy informatics. 

He has published more than 200 research articles in peer reviewed journals, conference proceedings, and books, and has more than a decade of experience in project leadership and technology development, specializing in population dynamics, epidemiology, network science, design of services-oriented architectures, and socio-technical systems. These systems include: urban transport networks, the Internet, the World Wide Web, wireless networks, and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Unlike physical networks, coupled socio-technical networks are affected not only by physical laws but also by human behavior and regulatory agencies. Understanding these extremely large socio-technical and critical infrastructure systems thus presents novel challenges to researchers. 

Furthermore, he has worked very closely with analysts and policy makers to evaluate and formulate policies in the area of public health epidemiology, resilient infrastructures, and national security. Marathe credits the collective team-science environment in which he works for this achievement.

Marathe received his bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and his doctoral degree from the State University of New York at Albany. Before coming to Virginia Tech in 2005, he worked in the Basic and Applied Simulation Science Group in the computer and computational sciences division at Los Alamos National Laboratory. 

He received the University at Albany Distinguished Alumni Award and the 2010 Award for Research Excellence at Virginia Bioinformatics Institute. He was the 2011 Inaugural George Michael Distinguished Scholar at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

 

 

Written by Emily Kale and Maureen Lawrence-Kuether.
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