Venu Govindaraju, VP for Research and Economic Development and SUNY Distinguished Professor, is also the founding director of the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors of Computer Science and Engineering at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. He received his Bachelor’s degree with honors from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 1986, and his Ph.D. from SUNY Buffalo in 1992.

A recognized authority in the field of Pattern Recognition, Govindaraju has received peer honors such as the IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements (2015), Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Kharagpur (2014), the IEEE Technical Achievement Award (2010), MIT Global Indus Technovator Award (2004), and fellowships from the major professional societies such as AAAS, ACM, IAPR, IEEE, and the SPIE. He is a member of the National Academy of Inventors (2015).

Govindaraju is credited with major conceptual and practical advances in this area with six books and over 425 refereed publications. He has served on the editorial boards of several premier journals including the most prestigious IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and has been the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Biometrics Council Compendium. Recently he served as the president of the IEEE Biometrics Council positioning it for consideration of a full fledged IEEE Technical Society.

Govindaraju has graduated 37 doctoral students as their major advisor and was recently awarded the University at Buffalo’s “Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring Award (2017)”. He has given over a hundred invited talks, keynotes, plenaries and seminars, at prestigious venues including influential think tanks such as the Science and Technology Investment committee of the National Academy of Sciences.

Govindaraju has had active and continuous sponsorship from the National Science Foundation for the past 15 years (2002-17) and a career total of nearly $70M of sponsored funding as a Principal or Co-Principal Investigator from several federal and state agencies and industry. His annual research expenditures are consistently over $1.5M, making him a top performer at UB.

Govindaraju is the Chief Research Officer at UB with an annual operating budget of $35M and over 100 staff members reporting to the Office of the Vice President of Research and Economic Development. He sits on the President’s cabinet as well as the Provost’s cabinet and is responsible for managing UB’s research enterprise, including supporting scholarly excellence, creating collaborations, ensuring compliance in a regulatory environment, and oversees programs that contribute to regional job growth and a diversified economy in the Western New York region.

• PhD, Computer Science, SUNY University at Buffalo, 1992
• MS, Computer Science, SUNY University at Buffalo, 1988
• BTech, Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of technology, India, 1986

Govindaraju is a Fellow of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), the IAPR (International Association of Pattern Recognition), and the SPIE (International Society of Optics and Photonics).

He is the recipient of the 2001 International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition Young Investigator award, the 2004 MIT Global Indus Technovator Award, the 2010 IEEE Technical Achievement Award, and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Distinguished Alumnus Award (2014).

Dr. Govindaraju is the 2015 IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award Winner and was named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2015.