Andries van Dam

Andries van Dam (Andy) has been on Brown's faculty since 1965, and was one of the Computer Science Department's co-founders and its first Chairman, from 1979 to 1985. He was a Principal Investigator and was the Director from 1996-1998, in 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. Professor van Dam received the B.S. degree with Honors in Engineering Sciences from Swarthmore College in 1960 and the M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963 and 1966, respectively. In June 2007, he received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo.

Research
His research has concerned computer graphics, hypermedia systems, post-WIMP user interfaces, including pen-centric computing, and educational software. He has been working for four decades on systems for creating and reading electronic books with interactive illustrations for use in teaching and research.

Awards

Among his awards are the Society for Information Display's Special Recognition Award (1974), the IEEE Centennial Medal (1984), the National Computer Graphics Association's Academic Award (1990), the ACM SIGGRAPH Steven A. Coons Award (1991), the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor Chair (1992), the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award (1994), the Thomas J. Watson, Jr. University Professor of Technology and Education Chair (1995), the IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal (1999), and the ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education (2000).

In 1994 he became an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Fellow. He received an honorary Ph.D. from Darmstadt Technical University in Germany (1995), an honorary Ph.D. from Swarthmore College (1996), and an honorary Ph.D. from the Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo in 2007. In 1996 he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, in 2000 he became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 2002 he received the CRA Distinguished Service award and the Brown University Sheridan Teaching award, and in 2004 was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Professional Activities

In 1967, Professor van Dam co-founded ACM SIGGRAPH and from 1985 through 1987 was Chairman of the Computing Research Association. He has been Associate Editor of the "ACM Transactions on Graphics" (1981-1986), Editorial Board Member of "Computers and Graphics", Pergamon Press (1983 -1994), Advisory Editor, "Journal of Visual Languages and Computing", Academic Press (1989-1998), and Editorial Board Member of the "IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics", (1994-1998). From 1991 - 2006 he served on the Microsoft Research Technical Advisory Board (MSR TAB).