Michael Franklin , former Liew Family Chair of Computer Science and founding Faculty Co-Director of DSI, has been appointed Deputy Dean for Computational and Mathematical Sciences in the University of Chicago’s Physical Sciences Division. Franklin will lead strategic planning for computational and mathematical sciences, building mechanisms to advance these disciplines and fostering collaborations across campus.
Franklin has been instrumental in establishing UChicago as a leader in computer science and data science since joining the University, where he held the inaugural Liew Family Chair of Computer Science. As Faculty Co-Director of DSI, he has championed investments in shared research infrastructure, including the DSI’s high-performance computing cluster, which now supports groundbreaking work across climate science, neuroscience, and particle physics. He is the Morton D. Hull Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science and Senior Advisor to the Provost for Computing and Data Science.
Prior to joining UChicago, Franklin served as the Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, where he co-founded the AMPLab, whose open source projects, among them Apache Spark, reshaped analytics. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a two-time recipient of the ACM SIGMOD Test of Time Award.