Professor, Department of Computer Science
Founding Director, Worldwide Computing Laboratorycvarela AT cs DOT rpi DOT edu
Ph: +1 (518) 276-6912,
Fax: +1 (518) 276-4033,
Office: Lally 308.
Dr. Carlos A. Varela is Professor of Computer Science and Founding Director of the Worldwide Computing Laboratory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is Associate Editor of the ACM Computing Surveys, the IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, and the IEEE Internet of Things Journal. He has authored the book "Programming Distributed Computing Systems: A Foundational Approach" (MIT Press, 2013). He was the General Chair for CCGrid 2016. He is PC Co-Chair for the InfoSymbiotics/Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems (DDDAS2022) conference and was the PC Chair for the 2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Cluster, Cloud, and Internet Computing (CCGrid 2020), the 2011 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Cluster, Cloud, and Grid Computing (CCGrid 2011), the 2012 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2012,) and the ACM AGERE! Workshop on Programming based on Actors, Agents and Decentralized Control at SPLASH 2014 and 2015. Dr. Varela has given 79 invited talks, including 12 plenary lectures on his research at international and national venues. He has been a member of 87 conference and workshop Program Committees. He has supervised seven Ph.D. students and 18 M.S. students. He and his students have received Best Paper awards at HPDC-GECO'2006, eScience'2007, CCGrid'2007, CLEI'2010, CCGrid'2016, DASC'2019. He is also a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, and industry awards from IBM, Google, Amazon, and PSEG. His research is currently supported by the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Dr. Varela is also an instrument-rated private pilot with over 1100 hours of flight experience, including cross-country trips from NY to CA, IL, TX, and FL. His current research interests include safer flight systems, software verification, cloud computing, middleware for adaptive distributed systems, and concurrent programming models and languages. Dr. Varela received his B.S with honors, M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, all from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prof. Varela will be on sabbatical until the Fall of 2023. Prof. Varela will visit GE Global Research's Control and Optimization's High Assurance Systems group at Niskayuna, NY, the University of Los Andes at Bogota, Colombia, and PUC-Rio at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. For more information on Prof. Varela's group's research, please visit the Worldwide Computing Lab page.