Biographical Data

Michael A. Langston received the Ph.D. in Computer Science from Texas A&M University in 1981. He currently holds the title of Professor of Computer Science at the University of Tennessee. Previous positions include stints at Washington State University, the University of Illinois and the European division of the University of Maryland. He was also on active duty for six years as an officer in the U.S. Army. There he served in a wide variety of roles. One such role was paratrooper and Executive Officer for D Troop, 2/17th Cavalry, the U.S. military's only airborne cavalry unit. Another was personnel database manager for all of VII Corps, which at that time encompassed roughly the southern half of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Dr. Langston's research interests include the analysis of algorithms, computational biology, discrete mathematics, fixed-parameter tractability, graph theory, optimization, parallel computation, reconfigurable computing and VLSI design. He is perhaps best known for his long-standing work on combinatorial algorithms, complexity theory and design paradigms for sequential and parallel computation. In addition to maintaining his research program, he regularly teaches courses on algorithm design, automata theory, combinatorics, graph theory and related subjects.

He has authored over 200 refereed journal articles, conference papers, book chapters and other reports. His work has been funded in the U.S. by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy and a variety of other state and federal agencies. It has been supported overseas by the Australian Research Council and the European Commission. He has served on an assortment of editorial boards, including the Association for Computing Machinery's flagship publication Communications of the ACM. Dr. Langston has received honors for duty, teaching, research and service. Notable among these are the Commendation Medal, U.S. Army, 1979, the Distinguished Teaching Award, Texas A&M University, 1981, the Chancellor's Award for Research and Creative Achievement, University of Tennessee, 1994, and the Distinguished Service Prize, ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory, 2001.