Andrea Richa

Featured mentor, FURI

President's Professor, School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence

Professor Andrea W. Richa joined Arizona State University (ASU) in 1998. She was inducted as 2022 President's Professor at ASU, one of the most prestigious faculty honors bestowed by the university. At ASU, she is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the School for Computing and Augmented Intelligence (SCAI) and an Honors Faculty at Barrett, the Honors College, and an Associate Faculty at the Center for Bio-computing, Security and Society at the Biodesign Institute, at the Global Security Initiative, and at the Biomimicry Center at ASU. She served as SCAI's Interim Associate Director in 2022-23. Professor Richa’s main areas of expertise are in distributed and network algorithms and computing in general. More recently, she has focused on developing the algorithmic foundations on what has been coined as programmable matter, through her work on self-organizing particle systems (SOPS) (see sops.engineering.asu.edu ). Her work has been widely cited, and includes, besides SOPS,  work on bio-inspired distributed algorithms, distributed load balancing, packet routing, wireless network modeling and topology control, wireless jamming, data mule networks, underwater optical networking, and distributed hash tables (DHTs). 

Richa received the 2024 ASU Fulton Undergraduate Research Initiative Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award, the 2021 ASU Faculty Women Association Outstanding Mentor Award and the 2017 SCAI Best Senior Researcher award. She is currently the recipient of a DoD MURI award and was the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, among others. She was the keynote speaker and program and general chair of several prestigious conferences. In particular, Professor Richa was the Program Committee chair of the 31st International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC), 2017, one of the top two conferences in distributed computing. Richa has also delivered several invited talks both nationally and internationally.  For more on her work and that of her students, please check sops.engineering.asu.edu .