Randal Burns

Randal Chilton Burns is a professor and Chair of the computer science department at Johns Hopkins University. He is a member of the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute, Institute for Data-Intensive Science, Engineering and the Science of Learning Institute and National Academy of Sciences. His research interests lie in building scalable data systems for exploration and analysis of big data.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

Burns graduated from Stanford University in 1993 with a bachelor's degree in geophysics.^[6] He earned his master's and doctorate from University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1997 and 2000 respectively. He also worked as a research staff member at IBM's Alamden Research Center between 1996 and 2002.^[1]

Burns's PhD dissertation is titled 'Data Management in a Distributed File System for Storage Area Networks'.^[7] He has worked on waste management of unused digital data.^[8][9] He was part of a team along with Alex Szalay and Charles Meneveau which built a 350TB turbulence database that provides access to large computational fluid dynamics simulations.^[10][11] In recent times, his research has focused on neuroscience where he built a cloud based web-service for neuroscience data and enabled better understanding of the human brain.^{[12][13][14][15]}