Venu Govindaraju is the Vice President for Research and Economic Development at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York (SUNY). He has served in this position as the Chief Research Officer since 2014. He received his Bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1986, and his Ph.D. from SUNY Buffalo in 1992. Govindaraju is credited with major advances in computer vision and pattern recognition (a subfield of AI). He has nearly 450 refereed publications which have garnered over 15000 citations and an h-index of 64. He has graduated 42 doctoral students as their major adviser and has served as PI (or Co-PI) on about $70M in extramural research. Govindaraju has received peer honors such as the IAPR Outstanding Achievement Award, Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Kharagpur, the IEEE Technical Achievement Award, and the MIT Global Indus Technovator Award. He is a fellow of major professional societies including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE). He is also a member of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).​