Biography

Ranjan Pal is a junior faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department (ECE division) at University of Michigan Ann Arbor, where he is part of the Network, Communication, and Information Systems (NCIS) research group. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) at the University of Michigan, a network member of the Trust and Technology Initiative at the University of Cambridge, and an engaging member of the Cybersecurity Center at the World Economic Forum. His primary research interest lies in the broad domain of cyber-governance - more specifically in the design and analysis of interdisciplinary cyber-risk management solutions for networked and distributed organizational information systems using tools from decision science, microeconomics, behavioral economics, privacy technology, and applied probability.

Ranjan got his PhD in computer science (2014) from University of Southern California's (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering by designing and analyzing one of the pioneering models for improving network security via cyber-insurance, and continued on to do independent postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge (CST, DPMMS) and USC (ECE). Ranjan held the Provost Fellowship at USC (the school's highest graduate student honor) throughout his PhD studies. He has two masters degrees (with CSE specializations in computational biology and computer/communication networks) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, dual with the National University of Singapore, and the University of California Davis, and has held (summer) visiting research positions at the University of Cambridge, Princeton University, Tsinghua University, King's College London, Deutsche Telekom Labs, Ciena Corporation, the University of Helsinki, and Aalborg University. Ranjan's research has received attention, mutliple times, from popular global media outlets that include Forbes, The Economic Times, The Financial Express, and The Times of India. He has also been invited to teach graduate courses in game theory at the premier Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management. Ranjan is currently an Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on MIS; consults for the cyber-assurance industry; and is a professional member of the IEEE, ACM, American Mathematical Society, INFORMS, SIAM, and the Game Theory Society.

In a 'past' life, Ranjan has been a core formal (VLSI/EDA) verification engineer at Cadence Design Systems, India, where he dabbled with VHDL, Verilog, formal logic, and digital logic design. He was lucky enough to be the first in his undergraduate batch to be placed from on-campus placements. In leisure, he likes to delve in movies, music, novels, recreational gambling (mostly blackjack), coffee chit-chat, and world travel (27 countries visited). Besides, he takes pride in being a Bengali from Calcutta - the bed of intellectual elitism in India, and the only mention of an Indian city in the NYT bestseller The Geography of Genius.