²⁰⁰²Andries van Dam

Thomas J. Watson, Jr., University Professor of Technology and Education and Professor of Computer Science at Brown University

Andries van Dam is the Thomas J. Watson, Jr., University Professor of Technology and Education and Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. He has been on Brown’s faculty since 1965, and was one of the department’s founders and its first chairman from 1979 to 1985. He is a principal investigator, and was the director from 1996-98, in the NSF Science and Technology Center for Graphics and Visualization, a research consortium including Brown, Caltech, Cornell, North Carolina (Chapel Hill), and the University of Utah.

Professor van Dam, who served as CRA’s board chair from 1985-87, was nominated because of his extensive influence over a number of years in many different areas. He has shown leadership in his sub-discipline and in the computing field as a whole. He has helped to establish several new disciplines, including graphics, hypertext, and distributed computing. He co-founded ACM SIGGRAPH, as well as the Institute for Research for Information and Scholarship and the Technology Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Visualization, both at Brown University.

Professor van Dam has served on the technical advisory boards of several companies, including Microsoft Research, and on several NSF and NAE advisory committees—ACM Curriculum ‘68; CRA; CSTB; NSF/CISE Advisory Committee; NAE Committee on Engineering Education; and CS departmental advisory committees (Georgia Tech and Princeton). He has promoted standards in the graphics community, and served as editor of multiple journals, such as ACM Transactions on Graphics; Computer Graphics and Image Processing; and IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

Andy van Dam has inspired large numbers of students to go into academic and industrial research careers. He has been involved with many startup companies as an advisor. His written contributions are prolific, and he has received numerous awards for technical work, including ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Award; IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr., Education Medal; the ACM SIGSCE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education; the SIGGRAPH Steven A. Coons Award, and the 2001 Harriet W. Sheridan Award for Distinguished Contribution to Teaching and Learning.

Professor van Dam is a Fellow of IEEE, ACM, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of NAE. He received the B.S. degree with Honors in Engineering Sciences from Swarthmore College in 1960, and the M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963 and 1966, respectively. He holds honorary Ph.D.s from Swarthmore and Darmstadt Technical University. Additional information is available on his website at: http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/avd/