CRA-I Welcomes New Leadership!

It is July 1st, which means it is CRA-Industry (CRA-I)’s first official change in leadership! We are delighted to welcome Divesh Srivastava and Fatma Özcan as our new Co-chairs! 

Fatma Özcan (Google)- Fatma Özcan works as a Principal Software Engineer at Google. She earned her PhD in computer science from University of Maryland, College Park. Fatma has been on the CRA-I Steering Committee since 2021 and has [helped] organized many CRA-I roundtables and workshops including  “Computing Research in Industry” and “Best Practices on using the Cloud for Computing Research” (roundtable and workshop). 

Divesh Srivastava (AT&T) – Divesh Srivastava is the Head of Database Research at AT&T. He earned his PhD in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Divesh has been on the CRA-I Steering Committee since 2020 and the CRA-I Council Chair since 2023, helping to grow the group to 11 individuals from 11 different companies and institutions. He has also been the organizer for many CRA-I roundtables and workshops including  “Accessible Technology for All,” “Sharing Healthcare Data,” and “Corporate Responsibility and Computing Research.”

Fatma and Divesh will take over for Vivek Sarkar (Georgia Tech) and Ben Zorn (Microsoft) who did a tremendous job serving as CRA-I’s initial Co-chairs starting in 2021. They were chartered by the CRA Board to stand up the new Industry-focused committee and have grown it from just an idea to its current state – a full Steering Committee and (almost full) Council made up of 17 different companies and institutions of different sizes. We thank them for their service, and for turning CRA-I into an asset for the entire computing research community.