Jitendra Malik was born in Mathura, India in 1960. He received the B.Tech degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1980 and the PhD degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1985. In January 1986, he joined the university of California at Berkeley, where he is currently the Arthur J. Chick Professor in the Computer Science Division, Department of Electrical Engg and Computer Sciences. He is also on the faculty of the department of Bioengineering, and the Cognitive Science and Vision Science groups. During 2002-2004 he served as the Chair of the Computer Science Division and during 2004-2006 as the Department Chair of EECS. He serves on the advisory board of Microsoft Research India, and on the Governing Body of IIIT Bangalore.
His current research interests are in computer vision, computational modeling of human vision and analysis of biological images. His work has spanned a range of topics in vision including image segmentation, perceptual grouping, texture, stereopsis and object recognition with applications to image based modeling and rendering in computer graphics, intelligent vehicle highway systems, and biological image analysis. He has authored or co-authored more than a hundred and fifty research papers on these topics, and graduated twenty-seven PhD students who occupy prominent places in academia and industry. According to Google Scholar, five of his papers have received more than a thousand citations each. He is one of ISI’s Highly Cited Researchers in Engineering.
He received the gold medal for the best graduating student in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1980 and a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1989. At UC Berkeley, he was selected for the Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2000, a Miller Research Professorship in 2001, and appointed to be the Arthur J. Chick Professor in 2002. He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Kanpur in 2008. He was awarded the Longuet-Higgins Prize for a contribution that has stood the test of time twice, in 2007 and in 2008. He is a fellow of the IEEE and the ACM, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2011 for “contributions to computer vision and image analysis”.