Andries van Dam

Andries van Dam (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) was the first chairman of the Computer Science Department at Brown University. Currently Thomas J. Watson, Jr. University Professor of Technology and Education and Professor of Computer Science at Brown, he is also Director of the NSF/ARPA Science and Technology Center for Computer Graphics and Scientific Visualization. His research interests include computer graphics, hypermedia systems, and workstations. He is past Chairman of the Computing Research Association, Chief Scientist at Electronic Book Technologies, Chairman of Object Power's Technical Advisory Board, and a member of Microsoft's Technical Advisory Board. A Fellow of both the IEEE Computer Society and of ACM, he is also cofounder of ACM SIGGRAPH. Coauthor of the widely used book Fundamentals of Interactive Computer Graphics with James Foley, and of Object-Oriented Programming in Pascal: A Graphical Approach, with D. Brookshire Conner and David Niguidula, he has, in addition, published over eighty papers. In 1990 van Dam received the NCGA Academic Award, in 1991, the SIGGRAPH Steven A. Coons Award, and in 1993 the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award.

In 2021, the Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California, honored Andy van Dam with a 2021 Fellow Award. The fellows program “honors distinguished technology pioneers — unsung heroes and legends — for their outstanding merit and significant contributions that have advanced computing.”