Dr. SHARAD SHARMA

My research interests include Modeling and Simulation of Emergency Response, Evacuation, Data Science, Data Visulaization, Intelligent Systems, Agent-based Systems, Virtual Reality, Gaming, Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, Human Computer Interaction, and Fuzzy Logic. I specializes in investigating modeling strategies to simulate human egress behavior during emergency evacuation for multi-agent systems (MAS) and multi-user virtual reality (MUVR) environments. Currently, I am a Professor in the Department of Information Science at the University of North Texas (UNT). Prior, I was a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Director of the Virtual Reality Laboratory at the Bowie State University (BSU). The projects in the VR Laboratory at BSU focused on emergency response stratergies and evacuation drills for Multi‐User Virtual Reality (MUVR) evacuation (Examples: subway evacuation, airplane evacuation, bus evacuation, VR city evacuation, and university campus evacuation) environments.

I was born and brought up at Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (Prev.University of Roorkee) where my Dad (Dr. H. G. Sharma) was Professor & Chair, Department of Mathematics (Retired now). He was in academics for more than 60 years and has completed more than 400 research papers, which are published in national and international journals. I have worked as CAD Engineer Intern at EMAG Technologies, Inc. in Ann Arbor, MI between Aug 2001 to Nov 2001 where I was involved in the development of Graphic User Interface in MFC/ Visual C++.

2018 USM Board of Regents "Faculty Award" for Excellence in Scholarship and Research in April 2018.

From Left: James T. Brady (Board of Reagents Chairman), Dr. Sharad Sharma, Dr. Aminta H. Breaux (President, Bowie State University), Dr. Robert L. Caret (University System of Maryland (USM) Chancellor).