Rui Fan is currently the SSC Director and the Curriculum and Teaching Committee Director.

Rui Fan joined ShanghaiTech University as an associate professor, PI in December 2016.  Prior to this he was an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.  He received his BSc in computer science and mathematics from Caltech in 2000, and his PhD in computer science from MIT in 2008.  He was a postdoc at the University of Toronto in 2008, and a Viterbi postdoc at the Technion, Israel in 2010.  His PhD dissertation received MIT's Sprowl's Award for best computer science theses.  He also received two best student paper awards at the ACM Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) conference.
His research interests span a number of topics in parallel and distributed computing.  He is especially interested in the design of efficient algorithms and algorithmic solutions to problems on large datasets. Applications areas which interest him include machine learning, energy efficient computing, and managing large scale systems.  He also works on distributed algorithms and synchronization related issues, as well as computational lower bounds.