Bio, Research and Awards

Dr. Raju Gottumukkala is the AAMA/LEQSF Regents Associate Professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, holding joint appointments with the Informatics Research Institute, the Mechanical Engineering Department, and the School of Computing and Informatics. He serves as the Director of Accessible Healthcare through AI-Augmented Decisions (AHeAD), an AI center of excellence in healthcare. From 2012 to 2022, he was the Site (Managing) Director for the NSF Center for Visual and Decision Informatics, an industry-university cooperative research center.

His research centers on human-centric intelligent systems, with a focus on developing AI/ML-based decision support tools that deliver real-world impact in public health, healthcare access, homeland security, and emergency management. His research has been implemented by industry and government agencies across Louisiana and has resulted in over 30 journal articles, two U.S. patents, and numerous conference publications in prestigious venues including IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security, IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, Nature Scientific Data, Scientific Reports, IEEE Access, and ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review.

Dr. Gottumukkala has been awarded over $100 million in research funding from prestigious sources including the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Energy (DOE), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Louisiana Board of Regents, and numerous industry partners. His most significant grants include the Hubs for Energy Resilience Operations (HERO) project ($87.3M, DNR/DOE, Co-PI), Partnership for COVID-19 Vaccination of Underserved Populations (VAX-UP) ($21.9M, Louisiana Department of Health, Co-PI), RAPID: Visual Analytics Approach to Real-Time Tracking of COVID-19 ($187K, NSF, PI), and Major Research Instrumentation: Development of A Distributed Visual Analytics Sandbox for High Volume Data Streams ($516K, NSF, PI). He has also been awarded EAGER: A Virtual Crisis Information Sharing and Situational Awareness Platform for Collaborative Disaster Response ($329K, NSF, PI) and Diagnostic Security Modules for the Electric Vehicle to Building Integration ($290K, DOE, PI).

His honors include the 2024 Researcher of the Year Award from the College of Engineering at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, the 2023 Outstanding Master's Mentor Award from the Graduate School, the 2017 Ralph E. POWE Junior Faculty Enhancement Award (one of only 36 national recipients), the 2017 Innovative Project of the Year Award for cyber-physical system security research from the Secretary of DNR & DOTD State of Louisiana, and the 2017 Outstanding Achievement in Research & Sponsored Activities Award. His research on forecasting influenza occurrence was selected as one of the 50 major NSF I/UCRC breakthroughs in 2016, and his work on NextGen BEOC using Software Defined Networking received the US Ignite Application "Most Likely to have a Big Impact" Award in 2016.

Dr. Gottumukkala has served in numerous professional service roles, including Co-chair of the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (2017), where he coordinated 28 workshops, PhD Student Awards Chair for IEEE ICDM, and as an organizing committee member for several international conferences. He has been an invited review panelist for the NSF Partnership for Innovation, NSF/NIH Smart and Connected Health, and the National Energy Technology Laboratory. He has also served as Co-editor for special issues in prominent journals and as a reviewer for IEEE Access, IEEE Transactions on Reliability, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, and other respected publications.

Dr. Gottumukkala received his Ph.D. in Computational Analysis and Modeling from Louisiana Tech University, his M.S. in Computer Science from Louisiana Tech University, and his B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Madras, India.