Advisory Council | Department of Computer Science

UT Department of Computer Science Advisory Council Mission

The UTCS Advisory Council is an external community of friends and alumni who support, advise, and assist the chair in accomplishing the department's academic and societal missions.

As ambassadors, we:

Provide advice and counsel to the chair and department on important issues affecting the future of the department, programs and external affairs
Promote the mission by participating in new initiatives that extend our programs to the larger community
Engage and actively support the fundraising efforts of the department

Forest Baskett

Dr. Forest Baskett, Ph.D., joined New Enterprise Associates in 1999 and has been a General Partner since 2004. Dr.

Nawaf Bitar is CIO of Citadel Securities where he leads all technology-related initiatives for the firm. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of Plum, Inc and Pulse Secure, LLC, and is a Venture Partner at Allegis Capital.

Ross Buhrdorf

Ross A. Buhrdorf joined ZenBusiness in 2016 and serves as the CEO. Prior to joining ZenBusiness, Mr.

Arjun Chopra

Arjun Chopra is a Partner at Floodgate. He leads the firm’s investments in opportunities that transform the “IT stack” in ways that help companies change the way they do business and compete.

Tara Estlin

Tara Estlin is Deputy Chief Technologist for Mission Systems and Operations at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. She is also the Supervisor of the JPL Machine Learning and Instrument Autonomy group. Dr.

Ashish Gupta

Ashish Gupta is VP, Engineering Fellow at Google.

Deepak Hathiramani

Deepak Hathiramani is Non-Executive Chairman of the Vistronix Board of Directors. The founder and former CEO of Vistronix, he has more than 25 years of management and technical experience with privately-funded and venture-funded high-tech start-ups.

Robert Hormuth

Robert Hormuth is VP/Fellow, Server Division CTO at Dell EMC. Previously Mr. Hormuth served as Executive Director of Platform Architecture & Technology in the Enterprise Office of CTO at Dell. Mr. Hormuth has 28 years in the computer industry. Mr.

Duncan Hudson

As Chief Platform Officer for National Instruments, Duncan G. Hudson III is responsible for guiding the evolution of NI’s product platform and leading the R&D fellows.

Amir Husain

Amir Husain is a serial entrepreneur and inventor based in Austin, Texas. He is the Founder & CEO of SparkCognition, Inc. an award-winning Machine Learning/AI driven Cognitive Analytics Company, and serves on the Board of Advisors for IBM Watson.

Nagraj Kashyap

Nagraj is Corporate Vice President at Microsoft where he founded and leads M12 (fka Microsoft Ventures), the corporate VC arm of Microsoft. At M12, Nagraj has led investments in Livongo, Cloudsimple, Rescale, Go1, Helpshift, Outreach.io, Kahoot and FigureEight (acquired by Appen).

Robert LeBlanc

Robert LeBlanc is the former Senior Vice President, IBM Cloud. In this role, he had global responsibility for IBM’s industry leading cloud portfolio of technology and services, including strategy, product design, offering development, marketing, sales, and service.

Pierre Malko

Pierre Malko founded Dante in 1998 and serves as Dante's CEO and President. He has responsibility for overall strategy of the firm, the architecture direction of the Allegory Platform, and the day-to-day operations of Dante.

Adriane McFetridge

Adriane McFetridge joined Netflix as the Director of Engineering in May 2017 and leads the Subscription Platform engineering team. Prior to joining Netflix, Adriane served as the VP of Payment Software Services for Verifone.

Tarun Nimmagadda

Tarun Nimmagadda is a co-founder of Mutual Mobile, the product development and innovation agency he co-founded at the age of 22. A tinkerer and creative thinker, Tarun was an early believer in the promise of connected devices.

Dheeraj Pandey

Dheeraj is the Founder, CEO & Chairman of Nutanix. He brings a wealth of experience of working at high growth enterprise software companies.

Raghu Ramakrishnan

Raghu Ramakrishnan is CTO for Data and a Technical Fellow in the Cloud and Enterprise (C&E) division at Microsoft.

Mickey Ristroph

Mickey Ristroph is a co-founder and CEO of Mutual Mobile. He guides Mutual Mobile’s research and development efforts for next-generation tools and platforms.

Jennifer Gill Roberts

Jennifer Gill Roberts is a Bay Area native, technologist, repeat entrepreneur and seasoned venture capitalist. She co-founded her current venture fund, Grit Ventures in 2015 with her partner, Kelly Coyne, to focus on pre-seed investments in AI+ Robotics. Prior to Grit, Jennifer co-founded RallyOn

Sean Scott

Sean Scott joined Amazon in 2006 and has served as the Vice President of Robotics Engineering at Amazon since April 2017.

Brian Skiba

Brian Skiba is part of the Babylon Health team in the US focused on Products, Engineering & Solutions for the Americas market.

Justin Taylor

Justin Taylor serves as the Director for the Skunk Works Mission Systems Technology Research & Development organization at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics.

Jerrell Watts

Jerrell Watts is currently Head of Algorithmic Trading at Point72. He was previously Head of Algorithmic Execution and Order Routing at Citadel LLC. At Citadel, he served in quantitative research roles on both the asset management and broker-dealer (Citadel Securities) sides of the business.

Gregg Zeitlin

Gregg Zeitlin co-founded Reservoir Capital Group in 1998 and serves as a Senior Managing Director and a member of the firm’s Investment Committees. Mr.