FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 2, 2016
Facebook director Rajesh Girish Parekh honored with Distinguished Alumni Award
Ames, Iowa—Iowa State University's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences honored Rajesh Girish Parekh with a Distinguished Alumni Award at an honors and awards ceremony on Oct. 27, 2016 in Ames, Iowa. The award recognizes outstanding alumni from the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State.
Parekh earned two degrees from Iowa State: a master’s degree in computer science in 1993 and a PhD in computer science in 1998.
Currently the director of analytics for Facebook, Parekh was honored for his contributions solving business problems through the field of big data analytics and data mining.
“We are thrilled to recognize Rajesh with a Distinguished Alumni Award from our Department of Computer Science,” Kim McDonough, director of alumni relations in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, said. “His impressive contributions to the field of big data analytics are worthy of special recognition, and we could not be more proud to honor him as an outstanding College of Liberal Arts and Sciences alumnus.”
Parekh started his professional career at Allstate where he used data mining to solve insurance problems like cross-sell, retention and fraud. Following Allstate, Parekh was senior director of research at Yahoo Labs and then vice president of data science at Groupon where he led the global Data Science and Business Intelligence teams.
Parekh has authored over 30 research publications and filed over 50 patents. He is an advisor to the Hive, an incubator for data-driven businesses, and LigaDATA, and is a co-chair for the Applied Data Science Invited Talks track at the KDD-2016 conference.
The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University is a world-class learning and research community. As Iowa State’s most academically diverse college, LAS educates students to become global citizens, providing rigorous academic programs in the sciences, humanities and social sciences within a supportive personalized learning environment. For more information, visit LAS.iastate.edu.
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Iowa State University
Contact: Kim McDonough, alumni relations director
Phone: 515-294-7487
Email: kmm@iastate.edu
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