Profiles

Leo Irakliotis is a senior university executive, data scientist and architect with more than 17 years of experience as a professor, program director, dean, provost, and consultant. He has served as dean of graduate and undergraduate schools of computing at Western Governors University and Nova Southeastern University and as a graduate program director at the University of Chicago. Irakliotis is an expert in post-traditional, professional, and graduate education combining new and time-honored modalities of learning. He has worked extensively on competency-based education, technology-mediated learning, and learning analytics.

After earning a M.S. degree in Physics from Miami University Irakliotis completed his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at Colorado State University.  In 1997 he joined MCI Telecommunications where he worked as an executive engineer in research and development for high-performance networking.  During his tenure at MCI he was a visiting professor of computer science at the Illinois Institute of Technology and a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago.

From 1997 until 2009 Irakliotis was a member of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago where he served as the Director of the Professional Programs, a fellow of the Computation Institute, and associate chairman of the Computer Science department. At the University of Chicago he led a highly successful and innovative program for graduate and professional education in computer science.  He was responsible for building partnerships and alliances with key industry leaders, the city of Chicago, and major employers through out the country. 
Irakliotis’ research focuses on parallel database system implementation with high-density optical storage, data modeling and data mining techniques for high-frequency data, medical informatics, and technology and public policy issues.

Irakliotis’ career highlights include a guest editorship of Computer, and the founding chairmanship and editorship of two major international conferences: Photonics in Computing in 1994 and 1995, and Critical Technologies for the Future of Computing in 2001.  He has served in the technical committees for conferences and in editorial boards for journals in the field of information technology and processing. As a consultant he advised the City of Chicago on IT workforce training and, on a separate project, on predictive analytics for policing. Irakliotis developed technology education for Chicago’s finance industry, participated as an consulting expert in patent litigation, counseled proprietary education groups, and represented the interests of the technology and scientific community to the US Congress as a member of the Science Visit Days.

Leo Irakliotis is an elected member of Sigma-Pi-Sigma and Sigma-Xi, an avid photographer, diver, sailor, and amateur radio operator.