Michael Scott, professor of computer science, has been appointed the Arthur Gould Yates Professor of Engineering. The Board of Trustees approved the appointment in January.
The author of the best-selling textbook Programming Language Pragmatics, Scott has received the Goergen Award for Distinguished Achievement and Artistry in Undergraduate Teaching and the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing. He is a fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Scott holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and has been at the University since 1985. He served as chair of the Computer Science Department from 1996 to 1999, and again in 2007. From 2014 to 2015 he was a visiting scientist at Google.
Scott researches the design and implementation of systems software for parallel and distributed computing, including work in synchronization mechanisms for multithreaded systems, transactional memory, concurrency pedagogy, and deterministic parallelism. He teaches courses including Programming Language Design and Implementation, Parallel Programming, Computer Organization, and Social Implications of Computing.