Dr. Randal Burns

Biography

Randal Burns is the Bill Lisa Stromberg Department Head and a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins University. He is a member of the Data Science AI Institute and his research has pushed the scalability limits of data science based on emergent storage technologies. Burns's work has evolved from engineering file systems and storage area networks in the 1990s to building scientific web services and scale-out cloud storage in the 2000s, and most recently developing graph and sparse-matrix engines for machine learning in the 2010s and 2020s. His contributions have inspired advancements in high-throughput science, numerical simulations of turbulence, and neuroscience microscopy. He has received the NSF CAREER Award and is a U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Principal Investigator. Additionally, he is a Kavli Fellow and has served on the Defense Science Study Group and DARPA’s Information Science Technology Study Group. Burns earned a Bachelor of Science in Geophysics from Stanford University in 1993 and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2000. Before joining Johns Hopkins, he was a research staff member at IBM's Almaden Research Center, where he won the Outstanding Innovation Award.

Research Interests