Krishnendu Chatterjee promoted to Professor at IST Austria

As of April 1, 2014, Krishnendu Chatterjee will be promoted to Professor at IST Austria. This is the result of a tenure evaluation, a compulsory evaluation according to IST Austria’s performance-orientated career model for scientists, the tenure-track model. Krishnendu Chatterjee, a computer scientist, is the second Assistant Professor to have been promoted, following Michael Sixt’s promotion in the fall of 2013.

President Thomas Henzinger congratulated Chatterjee on this result: “Krish arrived in 2009 as one of the first professors on campus and immediately proved his outstanding abilities, both as a scientist and as a teacher. His contributions to computer science logic are world-leading. At the same time, Krish has also played a vital role in the development of the Institute.”

Krishnendu Chatterjee studies the theoretical foundations of game theory and formal verification. Game theory, the study of interactive decision problems, can be used to study problems in logic and set theory, economics, cell development, population and evolutionary biology, and software systems. Chatterjee’s focus lies in the study of games played on graphs. As the behavior of software can be modeled and analyzed using graph games, the mathematical methods of game theory help in the development of safe software. This is the aim of formal verification, which seeks to prevent or detect programming errors to improve software quality. Krishnendu Chatterjee and his group also apply the methods and mathematics of game theory to questions in evolutionary and cancer biology.

Krishnendu Chatterjee, born 1978, studied Computer Science at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, before moving to the University of California at Berkeley where he finished his PhD in 2007. After working at the University of California at Santa Cruz from 2008 to 2009, Krishnendu Chatterjee joined IST Austria as Assistant Professor in June 2009. Chatterjee was awarded an ERC Starting Grant and a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship in 2011. For his doctoral research, he received the Ackerman Award 2008 for the best thesis worldwide in Computer Science Logic.

Tenure evaluation is an essential part of IST Austria’s tenure track model, which follows international standards of scientific careers. Promising young researchers are offered positions as fully independent group leaders, Assistant Professors, for a period of up to seven years. At the end of this period the Professorial Committee of IST Austria collects confidential reviews of the Assistant Professor’s scientific accomplishments from independent international experts. The committee then decides on the promotion to tenured Professor with an unlimited contract. The decision of the committee is based primarily on the research achievements of the scientist, plus the training, supervision and mentoring of PhD students and postdocs as well as service to the Institute and the scientific community. The Professorial Committee of IST Austria is chaired by Olaf Kübler from ETH Zurich.