PACT is run by Professor Rajiv Gandhi, Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University-Camden. He also teaches part-time at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in 2003. He also worked as a software engineer at Qualcomm from 1994-96.
His research interests are Algorithm Design, Combinatorial Optimization, and Probabilistic methods. He is a passionate educator and has worked with students with varied backgrounds, and he received the Provost’s Award for Teaching Excellence at Rutgers–Camden in 2006. He received a Fulbright fellowship to teach in Mumbai, India from Jan-May 2011. Prof. Gandhi has also received the 2022 ACM-SIGACT Distinguished Service Award.
In 2009, Professor Gandhi gave a lecture to a group of students at the Cherry Hill East high school and volunteered to teach a group of students topics in Discrete Mathematics during Saturdays over the course of the school year 2009-2010. He then continued to work with these students over the summer of 2010. In summer 2011, he worked with the Center for Computational Intractability to hold a similar program on the Princeton campus, and this program was repeated in the summer of 2012. Thus PACT was born.
Professor Gandhi has given an inspirational TEDx Talk in 2016 called “From Potential To Promise: Developing scholars, one eureka moment at a time” which can be found below.