Alex Aiken named chair of Computer Science

Professor Alex Aiken, the Alcatel-Lucent Professor in Communications and Networking, has been named chair of the Computer Science Department at Stanford Engineering.

He was jointly selected by Persis Drell, who became Dean of Stanford Engineering on Sept. 1, and by Jim Plummer who had previously held that post but will now resume his post as a professor of electrical engineering.

“Alex has a distinguished record as a researcher and a teacher, and has contributed in many ways to the growing success of the CS department,” Drell said. “Our judgment, which was enthusiastically supported by the faculty in the department, was that Alex has exactly the right combination of vision, management skills and listening skills.”

Aiken, who has published more than 150 scientific articles and presentations, focuses his research in the areas of programming languages and software verification. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a recipient of Phi Beta Kappa's Teaching Award and a former National Young Investigator.

His research has focused on developing reliable, high-performance software systems, which often involves improving performance or correctness or both. His research extends to the design of new programming languages and programming techniques that make it easier to write software that can be checked for errors.

Drell noted that Aiken takes over a department that recently revised its curriculum to broaden its appeal with the result that virtually every Stanford undergraduate now takes an introductory programming course, and so many students go on to major in the field that computer science has become the largest undergraduate major at Stanford.

“The computer science department is doing very well,” Aiken said. “We have strong interest from graduate and undergraduate students. We have great faculty who are engaged in a wide range of activities across the school and the university.

“Of course we have challenges, such as maintaining the quality of our program given this enrollment growth and supporting CS-related initiatives across campus,” Aiken said. “But these are challenges you want to have.”

Aiken succeeds Jennifer Widom who served five years as chair. Widom and Aiken are married and have two children.

"Unfortunately, I won't be able to say that I didn’t know what I was getting into when I took this post," Aiken quipped.