Jay Aikat

Jay Aikat is the Vice Dean of UNC-Chapel Hill’s new School of Data Science and Society since July 2022.  She is also a Research Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. In 2015, she served on a short-term assignment as a Data Scientist at NIEHS (National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences), a research institute of the US National Institute of Health, the nation’s medical research agency. Her research interests include computer networking, experimental methods in networking research and education; data science education and outreach; measurement and modeling of Internet traffic; Internet traffic generation; cloud security; cloud computing; wireless networks; congestion control; active queue management.

Aikat served as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), a research institute within UNC-Chapel Hill from 2016 – 2022. Prior to that, she worked for eight years in leadership roles in Information Technology, mostly in academia — her last position in IT was the Director of IT and Networking in the School of Information and Library Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. That is when she decided to expand her horizons and go back to school to get a Ph.D.

Aikat completed her PhD. in Computer Science in the area of Computer Networking at UNC-Chapel Hill. She earned her B.S in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and holds two M.S. degrees – Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science.