Rate My Professor Sanjay Lodha

Sanjay Lodha serves as Professor Emeritus in the Computer Science and Engineering Department within the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University, Houston, Texas, obtained in 1992, along with an M.S. degree in Engineering-Integrated Mathematics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, and an M.A. degree in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. Throughout his nearly 30-year tenure at UC Santa Cruz, Lodha has been a dedicated educator and researcher in Computer Science, earning the Excellence in Teaching Award from the graduating class of 1996. He previously received a Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of California, Berkeley. As a member of both ACM and IEEE, he has contributed significantly to the field through more than 80 research articles published in journals and conferences.

Lodha's research specializations encompass data curation—accessing and identifying relevant and reliable socio-economic data—and its visualization for policy analysis and actionable research. His interests include geospatial and data visualization, imaging and lidar sensors, sensor vision, data analytics, computational social science, technology for social good, and data journalism. He pursues multi-disciplinary collaborations with stakeholders, public organizations, and research scholars to produce impactful outcomes. Lodha is co-author of The Atlas of Global Inequality and is currently co-authoring The Atlas of California. He champions an innovative pedagogy for Computer Science that stresses innovation, entrepreneurship, and community engagement to empower society via software and technology tools. Lodha mentors undergraduate and graduate students in multidisciplinary e-research, building their capacity and guiding them to co-author research works. He fosters international and remote collaborations with students from various universities, promoting equity-oriented, community-engaged research focused on policy and societal benefit.