Four Questions for Associate Teaching Professor Dov Kruger

Dov Kruger brings years of teaching experience at Stevens Institute of Technology as an adjunct, visiting, assistant, and associate professor to his role as an associate teaching professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Rutgers. Since joining the ECE faculty in September 2023, he has been teaching Digital Logic Design, an entry level course for sophomores, and parallel and distributed programming, a graduate level class in advanced programming. Next semester, he will teach data structures and algorithms and database.

What fueled your passion for ECE?

I’ve been fascinated with computing since age 10, which was a lot more unusual back then. I’m interested in how to make computing more efficient, more reliable, and to simplify the experience of learning to program for students.

What is your current research focus?

I’ve been working on a new way of building web applications that can produce results 1000 times faster than current technologies. For example, the Johns Hopkins site would take 15 seconds to load the same Covid map every day – but we can load it in milliseconds.

When we eliminate redundancy and re-engineer code to be more efficient, it’s astonishing how fast computers are – and how much less power they require. It’s also satisfying to take a big, bloated system and create a new equivalent that is vastly more efficient and elegant.

I have other projects including a better document language for interactive textbooks.

Who is most likely to benefit from your research?

People using the web would always appreciate greater speed, and we can all benefit from decreasing power usage, since that contributes to global warming.

What do you most enjoy so far about your department and the School of Engineering?

I have some great colleagues to work with. I’m passionate about getting students more immersed in computing education – and have some terrific students who are highly motivated, which is really good.