Andy van Dam

Andries van Dam, Thomas J. Watson, Jr. University Professor of Technology and Education, and Professor of Computer Science, Brown University, received the BS degree with Honors from Swarthmore College in 1960 and the Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1966.  He has been on the faculty of Brown University since 1965, was one of the founders of its Department of Computer Science, and its first chairman from 1979 to 1985.  In 1967 he collaborated with Ted Nelson on the development of the Hypertext Editing System (HES). Since then, he and his team have built multiple other hypermedia systems. From 1995 until 1998 he was director of 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. 

Published books include the widely used references Fundamentals of Interactive Computer Graphics, co-authored with J. D. Foley, and its successor, Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice, co-authored with J.D. Foley, S.K. Feiner, and J.F. Hughes.  He has received many awards, including induction into the National Academy of Engineering and honorary doctorates from Darmstadt Technical University and Swarthmore College.  He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the ACM, sits on the Technical Advisory Board of Microsoft Research, and is Chairman of the Board and on the Technical Advisory Board for several startups.