Published on July 24, 2020
Dr. Malathi Veeraraghavan, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Virginia (UVA), passed away on Monday, May 11, 2020. Her family, friends, and the scientific community deeply mourn this loss.
UVA has written a beautiful In Memoriam highlighting Malathi’s journey from one-of-only-four female graduates in her electrical engineering class at IIT Madras in 1984 to esteemed researcher in the field. Malathi’s career included many accomplishments and many lives touched along the way.
In this space, we would like to honor how she was instrumental in setting the vision for our corner of the world, the FABRIC project.
MV, as she liked to be known, left a deep mark on our community. Most of us had a chance to interact with her at the many GENI Engineering Conferences. She was an early experimenter in GENI, and together with her students, tested a broad range of novel ideas ranging from a new multicast data transfer protocol targeting large scientific datasets to optical datacenter network architectures. . One of her passions was educating the next generation of engineers and scientists, which she often did by introducing her students to GENI and other experimental environments.
MV was one of the first people we wanted to contribute when we began to envision the FABRIC testbed, and we were thankful for her acceptance of the role of Science Design Driver. Even in these early stages, MV has left her mark by helping to imagine interesting and challenging new experiments that can’t be done anywhere else. We plan to create a system that would make her proud.