From Potential to Promise - Developing Scholars, one Eureka moment at a time

In this talk, I will tell the story of our work with some truly remarkable undergraduate students at Rutgers-Camden, who despite many odds have achieved success that is unprecedented for the Camden campus. I will discuss the various challenges that we faced and some ideas that have worked very well (and some that have not) for us. We have been applying some of these ideas in our work with high school students and students at other institutions. This talk should be of interest to all faculty and students.

Dr. Rajiv Gandhi is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Rutgers University-Camden. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2003. He worked as a software engineer at Qualcomm from 1994-96. His research interests lie in the broad area of theoretical computer science. Specifically, he is interested in approximation and randomized algorithms, distributed algorithms, and graph theory. He has published papers in these areas in leading journals and conferences. He has been the recipient of several teaching excellence awards -- at Rutgers-Camden and at other universities. He was also the recipient of the Chancellor's award for Civic Engagement at Rutgers-Camden in 2013. He was a Fulbright Fellow from Jan-June 2011, during which he worked with students in Mumbai. Since 2009, he has also been working with high school students as part of the Program in Discrete Mathematics and Computer Science.