Professor Rao obtained his Ph.D in computer science from the University of Iowa, and also has an M.S. in logic and computation from Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests originate in distributed computing, specifically algorithms and formal methods for concurrent and distributed systems, and include solar energy and microgrids, cloud computing, energy-aware computing ("green IT"), distributed algorithms in sensor networks and other domains, algebraic theories of fault tolerance and system safety, safety-critical systems, and demand-side resource management. He is also a regular reviewer for the ACM Computing Reviews journal (computingreviews.com), which reviews a sample of the latest publications related to the computing sciences.