Edward D. Lazowska

Edward D. Lazowska in 2007

Edward D. "Ed" Lazowska is an American computer scientist. He holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, and is the founding Director of the University of Washington eScience Institute. He serves as Chair of the Computing Community Consortium, a national effort to engage the computing research community in fundamental research motivated by tackling societal challenges.

Scholarship

Lazowska’s research and teaching concern the design, implementation, and analysis of high-performance computing and communication systems, and, more recently, the techniques and technologies of data-intensive science. He co-authored the definitive textbook on computer system performance analysis using queuing network models,^[1] contributed to several early object-oriented distributed systems, and co-developed widely used approaches to kernel and system design in areas such as thread management, high-performance local and remote communication, load sharing, cluster computing, and the effective use of the underlying architecture by the operating system.

Leadership

Lazowska chaired the Computing Research Association from 1997–2001, the NSF CISE Advisory Committee from 1998–99, the DARPA Information Science and Technology Study Group from 2004–06, the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (co-chair with Marc Benioff) from 2003–05, and the Working Group of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology to review the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program in 2010 (co-chair with David E. Shaw).^[2] He served as Chair of University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering from 1993-2001, a period during which that program consolidated its reputation as one of the top computer science programs in the nation and the world.

Lazowska has mentored a number of students, including Hank Levy (University of Washington), Yi-Bing Lin (National Chiao Tung University), Ed Felten (Princeton University), and Christophe Bisciglia (successively Google, Cloudera, and WibiData).

Recognition

Lazowska is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a Member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received the 2012 Vollum Award for Distinguished Accomplishment in Science and Technology.

Personal history

Lazowska was born on August 3, 1950 in Washington, D.C. He obtained his A.B. at Brown University in 1972, advised by Andries van Dam and David J. Lewis, and his M.Sc. in 1974 and Ph.D. in 1977 at the University of Toronto, advised by Kenneth C. Sevcik.

References

External links

• Edward D. Lazowska's home page, University of Washington