Rate My Professor Jay Aikat

Jay Aikat is a Research Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a position she has held since December 2011. Since July 2022, she has served as Vice Dean of UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Data Science and Society. Aikat earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science, focusing on computer networking, from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2010. She also holds an M.S. in Computer Science from UNC-Chapel Hill, an M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, and a B.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology in Mesra, India. Before transitioning to academia, Aikat spent eight years in information technology leadership roles, primarily in academia, including as Director of IT and Networking in UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. She joined UNC-Chapel Hill in 1996 and served as Chief Operating Officer at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), a university research institute, from May 2016 to 2022. In 2015, she completed a short-term assignment as a Data Scientist at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Aikat's research specializations include experimental methods and models in networking research and education, measurement and modeling of Internet traffic characteristics, protocol benchmarking, Internet traffic generation, wireless networks, congestion control, active queue management, airborne networking as cyber-physical systems, data science, cloud security, and cloud computing. Key publications feature 'Variability in TCP Round-Trip Times' (ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, 2003), which has garnered 243 citations; 'The Effects of Active Queue Management on Web Performance' (ACM SIGCOMM, 2003, best paper award, 162 citations); and the book 'The Effects of Traffic Structure on Application and Network Performance' (Springer, 2012). Other notable works include 'Rethinking Security in the Era of Cloud Computing' (IEEE Security & Privacy, 2017) and papers on airborne network simulations and topology algorithms. Aikat has led data science initiatives at UNC-Chapel Hill since 2013 and contributed to faculty governance through election to the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee (2020-2026, 2023-2026) and UNC Faculty Council (2018-2024).