Jayadev Misra is an Indian-born computer scientist who has spent most of his professional career in the United States. He is the Schlumberger Centennial Chair Emeritus in computer science and a University Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. Professionally he is known for his contributions to the formal aspects of concurrent programming and for jointly spearheading, with Sir Tony Hoare, the project on Verified Software Initiative (VSI).

Education and early career

Misra received a

B.Tech. A Bachelor of Technology (Latin ''Baccalaureus Technologiae'', commonly abbreviated as B.Tech. or BTech; with honours as B.Tech. (Hons.)) is an undergraduate academic degree conferred after the completion of a three to five-year program of stud ...

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

from IIT Kanpur, India in 1969 and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland in 1972. After a brief period working for IBM, he joined the University of Texas at Austin in 1974 where he has remained throughout his career, except for a sabbatical year spent at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

during 1983–1984. He retired from active teaching in 2015.

Major professional contributions

Misra and

K. Mani Chandy Kanianthra Mani Chandy (born 25 October 1944) is the Simon Ramo Professor of Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He has been the Executive Officer of the Computer Science Department twice, and he has been a pr ...

have made a number of important contributions in the area of concurrent computing. They developed a programming notation and a logic, called UNITY, to describe concurrent computations. Leslie Lamport says: "The first major step in getting beyond traditional programming languages to describe concurrent algorithms was Misra and Chandy's Unity" and "Misra and Chandy developed proof rules to formalize the style of reasoning that had been developed for proving invariance and leads-to p