USM Board of Regents Faculty Award for Excellence in Scholarship or Research
Vandana Janeja, Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development and Professor of Information Systems, College of Engineering and Information Technology; Director, iHARP, NSF-HDR Institute for Harnessing Data and Model Revolution in the Polar Regions
Vandana Janeja is an exemplary researcher, mentor, educator, and leader in the field of data science and artificial intelligence. She has brought an ethos of equity, respect, transparency, and curiosity to her teams’ research efforts that has enabled a model of transdisciplinary collaboration for social impact. Her abilities have played a key role in the advancement of computationally intensive methods in arctic research, as shown through the iHARP project she leads. She heads the Multi Data Lab at UMBC, uniting important societal projects such as climate change, ethics in data science, misinformation detection, and security through the lens of her research in data science. Dr. Janeja is deeply committed to mentoring a diverse group of students and researchers. She is currently mentoring 10 doctoral students, as well as directing the undergraduate Data Science Scholars Program. Her outreach to engage students from different majors and K-12 students brings new generations into the real world applications of data science, while allowing these students to have real impact. Dr. Janeja holds a Ph.D. in information technology from Rutgers University. She completed her M.B.A. from Rutgers University and an M.S. in computer science from New Jersey Institute of Technology.