Jeffrey Vitter

Jeffrey Scott Vitter is a U.S. computer scientist and academic administrator. Born in 1955 in New Orleans, Vitter has served in several senior higher education administration posts. He is a former chancellor of the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss). He assumed the chancellor position on January 1, 2016. His formal investiture to the chancellorship took place on November 10, 2016, at the University of Mississippi's Oxford Campus.

Education Vitter was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. He earned a Bachelor of Science in mathematics with highest honors from the University of Notre Dame in 1977, a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University under the supervision of Donald Knuth in 1980 and a master of business administration from Duke University in 2002.

Vitter served at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas as provost and executive vice president for academics from 2008 to 2009. He also oversaw A&M's campus in Doha, Qatar. From 2010 to 2015, Vitter was provost and executive vice chancellor and Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. As provost, Vitter was the chief academic and operations officer for the Lawrence and Edwards campuses. He also pushed to remove the name of a donor from a university school in response to racist online posts by the donor. Academically, he led the university to attain R1 university status, a classification reflecting a high level of research activity. The Daily Mississippian, the student newspaper, characterized his tenure as chancellor as a time of both significant campus construction and "cultural transition", including efforts to enhance diversity and inclusiveness. He retired in 2020 as Distinguished Professor Emeritus; he continues to work as a consultant and hold an adjunct professorship at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. He has made fundamental contributions in databases; compressed data structures and indexing; data compression, including adaptive Huffman coding, arithmetic coding, image compression, and video compression; hashing and search data structures; randomized algorithms; sampling and random variate generation; prediction and machine learning; and average-case complexity.

Honors and awards Vitter is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) (class of 2018), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (2009), a Fulbright Scholar (1998), a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) (1996), a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) (1993), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow (1986), a National Science Foundation (NSF) Presidential Young Investigator Awardee (1985), and a member of Phi Kappa Phi (2017), Sigma Xi (1983), and Phi Beta Kappa (1977).