Michael Ralph Fellows (born June 15, 1952 in Upland, California) is Professor at Charles Darwin University, Australia, and Director of the Parameterized Complexity Research Unit (PCRU). Fellows is recognized as one of the founders of Parameterized complexity, a complexity framework that uses structure in hard problems for the design and analysis of algorithms for their solution. Parameterized Complexity has strong connections to algorithmic engineering, and is increasingly important in fields as diverse as Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and Bioinformatics. He was awarded an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellowship (for five years, beginning 2010). In 2007, Fellows was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award for his leadership and development of the field. In 1999, he married Frances Novak Rosamond, also a scientist, who shares his love of mathematics and adventure.
Mike Fellows received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego in 1985, and his M.A., Mathematics, also from UCSD in 1982. He has taught in the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. In 2007, Fellows was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award. His German host was Prof Rolf Niedermeier and Mike spent part of 2007 and most of 2008 at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena, Germany, working with Rolf Niedermeier. Also in 2007, Mike became one of the first Fellows of the Institute of Advanced Study (Durham), UK and a Fellow of Grey College at the University of Durham. He is an Area Editor for the Journal of Computer and System Sciences since 2004, and Advising Editor for the special Section on Parameterized Complexity in the Journal of Computer and System Sciences. He is Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Algorithms. He is Guest Editor (with others) for a Special Issue on Parameterized Complexity in the Journal of Combinatorial Optimization to be published in 2010, and in 2008 was Guest Editor for a special double issue of The Computer Journal with 15 surveys on Parameterized Complexity. He is a member of the Steering Committee for the conference series International Workshop on Parameterized and Exact Computation, proceedings published by Springer in Lecture Notes in Computer Science. He has published over 150 scientific articles and three books (see DBLP and ACM Authors) and is a popular speaker.
Professor Fellows is known for his innovative science communication. His books Computer Science Unplugged! (written with Tim Bell and Ian Witten), and This is MEGA-Mathematics! (with Nancy Casey) convey sophisticated concepts such as intractability, sorting networks, and cryptography. They have won several science popularization awards, and been translated into languages including Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, and German, with more translations underway. Unplugged! was part of the famous British Fraraday Christmas Lectures in 2008, which was given by Professor Christopher M. Bishop of UK Microsoft Research. Dr. Fellows is also the author of several passion plays about mathematics, with mathematical proofs enacted on-stage, which were performed at the Fringe Theatre in British Columbia.