Vandana Janeja is Professor and Chair of the Information Systems department at the

University of Maryland Baltimore County. She is the director of iHARP, an NSF HDR Institute for Harnessing Data and Model Revolution in the Polar Regions. Her research is in the area of data science with a focus on spatio-temporal mining, data heterogeneity across multiple domain datasets. She heads the Multi Data lab at UMBC which brings together important societal projects such as climate change, ethics in data science, misinformation detection and security through the lens of her research in data science. She is the UMBC lead for the IUSE NSF grant which focuses on developing undergraduate data science curriculum and establishes a data science ecosystem of a foundational data science course, ethics module, analytics certificate and peer mentoring network of data science scholars. She is also the PI on an NSF SaTC research grant which brings together sociolinguistic annotations in conjunction with AI for better discernment and detection of deepfakes. This grant also includes a training element to see the impact of linguistics training on deep fake discernment by students.

She is member of the UMBC ADVANCE Executive committee focusing on diversity in STEM, and an ELATES at Drexel leadership fellow (2021-2022). She is a UMBC innovation fellow (2020-2022) advancing the ideas of including ethics in data science. She served as an expert at NSF supporting data science activities in the CISE directorate (2018-2021). She also served as AAAS S&TP fellow in the Office of the Assistant Director in the Directorate of Computer Information Systems and Engineering (CISE) at NSF (2017-2018). Her research has been funded through federal, state and private organizations including NSF, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, MD State Highway Administration, CISCO.

She holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology from Rutgers University. She completed her MBA from Rutgers University and MS in Computer Science from New Jersey Institute of Technology.