Jay Aikat

Jay Aikat is 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 U.S. 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 and active queue management.

Aikat served as the chief operating officer at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), a research institute within UNC-Chapel Hill from 2016 to 2022. Prior to that, she worked for eight years in leadership roles in information technology, mostly in academia and 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 Ph.D. 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 in electrical and computer engineering and computer science.