Prof. Sarita Adve is the Richard T. Cheng Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned her B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay in 1987 and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1989 and 1993 respectively.
Prof. Adve started as an associate professor in 1999 and then became a full and chaired professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining the University of Illinois, she was an assistant professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University between 1993-1999.
Prof. Adve’s research contributions span the computing system stack, including hardware, programming languages, systems, and applications. Her leadership in the area of memory consistency models transformed how parallel hardware and software interact, resulting in higher performance and easier-to-program systems. She co-developed the memory models for the Java and C++ programming languages based on her early work on data-race-free models. That body of work serves as the foundation for memory consistency models for most hardware and software systems today.
She is also known for her work on heterogeneous systems and software-driven approaches for hardware resiliency. She currently works on enabling the transformative potential of extended reality (XR) systems (including virtual, augmented, and mixed reality). Her group released ILLIXR (Illinois Extended Reality testbed), the first end-to-end open-source extended reality system, to democratize XR systems research, development, and benchmarking. She chairs the industry-backed ILLIXR consortium and leads the Center for Immersive Computing at Illinois.
Prof. Adve is also recognized for her many service contributions to the research community. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the winner of the ACM/IEEE CS Ken Kennedy award. She is a fellow of ACM and IEEE. She is also the ACM SIGARCH chair and co-founded the CARES movement. She won the Computing Research Association (CRA) Distinguished Service Award for CARES which addresses discrimination and harassment in the computing research community.
Hobbies:
“Reading, traveling, hanging out with my (now adult) children”