Biography

Santosh Kumar is Lillian & Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence Professor in Computer Science at the University of Memphis. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Ohio State University in 2006, where his dissertation was awarded a Presidential fellowship. In 2010, the Popular Science magazine named him one of America’s ten most brilliant scientists under the age of 38 (called “Brilliant Ten”) for leading the AutoWitness GPS-less burglar tracking project and AutoSense wearable sensor project for mobile measurement of stress and addictive behaviors. His current research seeks to revolutionize the research and practice of healthcare via evidence-based innovation in wearable sensing and mobile phones. He was director of the NIH Center of Excellence in Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge (MD2K) that involved 20+ investigators in computing, engineering, behavioral science, and medicine from Cornell, Georgia Tech, Michigan, Memphis, Northwestern, Ohio State, Rice, UMass, UCLA, UCSD, UCSF, and West Virginia.  He is currently director of the NIH NIBIB mHealth Center for Discovery, Optimization, and Translation of Temporally-Precise Interventions (the mDOT Center) that provides the methods, tools, and infrastructure for researchers to discover, optimize and deploy temporally-precise mHealth interventions to address growing public health problems.

Dr. Kumar received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Ohio State University in 2006 where he received the SBC Presidential Dissertation Fellowship award for his doctoral work. He received his M.S. in Computer and Information Science from the Ohio State University in 2002, and B. Tech. with Honours in Computer Science and Engineering in 1998 from the Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India. Santosh worked as a software engineer for Siemens Communications Software, Bangalore, India for two years (July 1998-Aug 2000). For schooling, he went to Sainik School Purulia (1987-1992) and St. Michaels Higher Secondary School (1992-1994), as well as Gandhi Shikshan Sansthan (GSS) in Ratanpur, Begusarai, Bihar for elementary school education.