Sandhya Dwarkadas, who chairs the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia, has been elected to the rank of fellow by the council of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the world’s premier scientific societies.
The rank is given to AAAS members “for meritorious contribution to the advancement of science and engineering,” according to the association.
“I am humbled by this honor and immensely grateful to my network of collaborators — both peers and students — who have all played a part in the success and impact of the work being recognized by this award,” Dwarkadas said.
Dwarkadas’ election citation reads: “For cutting-edge work in computer architecture, parallel and distributed computing, and issues at the interface of hardware and software with a particular focus on sharing and concurrency control.” She joins fellow UVA School of Engineering and Applied Science faculty members Patrick Hopkins and Venkat Lakshmi in the new AAAS cohort.
This honor is a testament to the entirety of Sandhya’s contributions as a groundbreaking researcher, teacher and influential leader.
Dwarkadas has made fundamental contributions to the design and implementation of shared memory in hardware and software. Her work also helps systems automatically adjust their settings to save energy and use resources efficiently. Her innovations improved the speed, energy efficiency and ease of use of modern computing systems.
But Dwarkadas is more than a researcher. She is also recognized as an educator, administrator and driver of expanding the talent pool from which her discipline draws to keep computing technology ahead of society’s needs.
“The AAAS council is selective in who it elects as fellow,” said Jennifer L. West, the Saunders Family Professor of Engineering and dean of UVA Engineering. “This honor is a testament to the entirety of Sandhya’s contributions as a groundbreaking researcher, teacher and influential leader, not only in her field, but in science and engineering as a whole.”
Leader, Researcher and Educator
Dwarkadas, UVA’s Walter N. Munster Professor, was selected to lead the Department of Computer Science, UVA Engineering’s largest department, in 2022. She arrived from the University of Rochester’s Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where she also had chaired the computer science department and served as interim associate vice president for research. She also held a secondary appointment in electrical and computer engineering. In 2020 she won the Edmund A. Hajim Outstanding Faculty Award for excellence in research, teaching and service.
Most recently, she received a 2025 Distinguished Alumni Award from her undergraduate institution, the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India. Dwarkadas completed her master’s and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering at Rice University.
She is a co-recipient of 12 patents and author or co-author of more than 120 papers. A paper she co-authored in 2002, “Energy-efficient processor design using multiple clock domains with dynamic voltage and frequency scaling,” won the 2022 Test of Time Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society Technical Committee on Computer Architecture.
She has advised 13 Ph.D. students who are now faculty members, researchers and leaders at top universities or technology companies such as Ohio State University, University of Utah, Meta, Google and Nvidia.
Dwarkadas, a fellow of the IEEE and of the Association for Computing Machinery, also works to ensure that pathways to computing careers are accessible to all with the desire and ability to work in the field. She has been a longtime member of the Computing Research Association’s Widening Participation Subcommittee and has served as its co-chair.
In 2023, she was elected to the board of the Computing Research Association after having served as an appointed representative of CRA-WP. She also served on the CRA Government Affairs Committee.
Expanding Computer Science at UVA
In the two and a half years Dwarkadas has been at UVA, she has overseen the hiring of 21 new faculty members, a significant expansion of the department’s tenure-track and teaching faculty.
“The growth has enabled the department to achieve critical mass in both existing and new areas of research, increasing visibility and impact by leveraging synergies both within the department and across the engineering school and the rest of the University,” Dwarkadas said.
These areas of research include artificial intelligence, computer science education, computer systems, cyber-physical systems, human-computer interaction, robotics, security and privacy, software engineering, and theory.
Computing touches almost every human endeavor.
Including secondary appointments, the department now has 68 faculty (with three more arriving in fall 2025), with a 2024 graduating class of roughly 700 B.S. and B.A. students from the engineering school and the College of Arts and Sciences, 78 master’s students and 28 Ph.D. students.
As both faculty and student populations continue to grow, Dwarkadas has turned her attention to issues of scale, developing mechanisms and policies for mentoring and retention, with a view to maintaining a collaborative and collegial culture that fosters learning and innovation.
“Computing touches almost every human endeavor and crosses so many disciplinary boundaries that the need to attract and nurture the brightest minds approaching problems from disparate points of view is more critical than ever,” she said.
