Rada Chirkova

Rada Chirkova is a Professor of Computer Science at North Carolina State University, with expertise spanning Algorithms and Theory of Computation, Cyber Security, Data Sciences and Analytics, Health Care Information Technology, and Information and Knowledge Management. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University (2002) and serves as Director of the NCSU CSC Laboratory for the Science of Technologies for End-to-End Enablement of Data (STEED) and Director of the NCSU site of the NSF I/UCRC Center for Accelerated Real Time Analytics (CARTA) from 2018–2024.

• Education: Ph.D., Stanford University, 2002

Her research focuses on data analytics, knowledge graphs, and their applications in healthcare and cybersecurity. Recent projects include biomedical knowledge graph analysis for drug repurposing and privacy-preserving distributed learning in integrated circuit design. She has also contributed to temporal data exchange frameworks and healthcare data integration.

Her publications emphasize interdisciplinary approaches, combining computer science with pharmacology, linguistics, and public health. Notable works include methods for drug repurposing, clinical outcome modeling, and knowledge graph embeddings.

Scientific Awards:

• Senior Member, ACM - 2012
• Distinguished Member, ACM - 2022
• IBM Faculty Awards - 2007, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2018, 2019
• IBM University Partnership Program Awards - 2003, 2004, 2007
• NSF Faculty Early CAREER Award - 2005
• Faculty Research and Professional Development Award (NCSU) - 2003

She has advised numerous Ph.D. and M.Sc. students, including Kara Schatz, Pei-Yu Hou, and Daniel Korn. Current advisees include Nahed Abu Zaid, Maryam Mubarak, and Ezio Mei.

Her grants include the $19.5M NSF-funded Science and Technologies for Phosphorus Sustainability (STEPS) Center, privacy quantification projects in distributed learning, and leadership in CARTA, a collaborative real-time analytics initiative with IBM, Cisco, and NetApp. She also co-led a planning grant for the Rare Disease Observatory and contributed to computational social science research.

She directs the Taming the Data invited-speaker series at NC State’s Department of Computer Science and teaches graduate-level Computational Applied Logic courses.