GrammaTech Co-Founder Thomas Reps Named Batra Chair in Computer Sciences at University of Wisconsin

ITHACA, NY — GrammaTech, Inc., a leading maker of tools that improve and accelerate embedded software development, today announced that Thomas Reps, GrammaTech Co-Founder and President, and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has received the honor of being the first to hold the newly established Rajiv and Ritu Batra Chair. The Batra Chair in Computer Sciences was established by Rajiv and Ritu Batra to support the most innovative minds in Computer Science.

The founder of Palo Alto Networks, Mr. Batra earned his master’s degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1983. To help expand the university’s globally recognized computer science department, Mr. Batra and his wife Ritu established the Rajiv and Ritu Batra Chair in Computer Sciences.

“I’m honored and delighted to accept the inaugural appointment to the Rajiv and Ritu Batra Chair in Computer Sciences,” said Thomas Reps. “Advancing the science of software analysis has been my life-long passion, and the Batra Chair will accelerate our ability to solve some of the toughest challenges in this area of computer science research. I expect to use the Batra Chair’s resources to pursue some recent connections that my students and I have discovered between the field of program analysis and the fields of machine learning, databases, and constraint programming.”

The Batra Chair will provide funds for Reps to use for more open-ended research, allowing him to tackle broader challenges than those he is pursuing with funding from grants obtained via normal academic-funding channels. It will allow Reps to support two graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who will be able to pursue these new research initiatives.

In addition to the Batra Chair, Reps’ other major honors in computer science include the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1986), Packard Fellowship (1988), Humboldt Research Award (2000) and Guggenheim Fellowship (2000). He is an ACM Fellow (2005) and a foreign member of the Academia Europaea (2013).