The Brown University News Bureau
38 Brown Street / Box R
Providence, RI 02912
401 / 863-2476
Fax: 401 / 863-9595
1995-1996 index


Distributed February 29, 1996
Contact: Tracie Sweeney

National Academy of Engineering honors Brown computer scientist

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Andries van Dam, the Thomas J. Watson Jr. University Professor of Technology and Education and professor of computer science at Brown University, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for his contributions to computer graphics research and computer science education.

Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions given to an engineer. Membership honors those who have made important contributions to engineering theory and practice and those who have demonstrated unusual accomplishment in the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology.

A member of Brown's faculty since 1965, van Dam was one of the computer science department's founders and its first chairman. He is also director of the NSF Science and Technology Center for Graphics and Visualization, a research consortium including Brown University, California Institute of Technology, Cornell University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Utah. His research has concerned computer graphics, text processing and hypermedia systems, and workstations. He has been working for nearly 30 years on systems for creating and reading electronic books with interactive illustrations, based on high-resolution interactive graphics systems, for use in teaching and research. Most recently, he has been concerned with teaching object-oriented programming and design as an introductory computer science course.

Van Dam received a B.S. degree with honors from Swarthmore College and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of Sigma Xi, IEEE Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery. He is the author or co-author of a number of now-classic reference books on computer graphics. His most recent book is Object-Oriented Programming in Pascal, A Graphical Approach, written with D. Brookshire Conner and David Niguidula. Van Dam also is the author or co-author of more than 80 papers.

######
95-098