BIO
I came to Oberlin in 1980 in the Mathematics Department after receiving a Ph.D. in Functional Analysis and an M.S. in Statistics at the University of Illinois. In 1985 Rich Salter and I left the Mathematics Department to form a new Computer Science Program, which eventually became the CS Department. We were one of the first liberal arts colleges to have a stand-alone Computer Science group. At one time or another I have taught almost everything we offer, and somehow my students seem to have survived. I have been given two awards for excellence in teaching: a "Professor Props" award voted by the first-year class in 2012 and an Arts and Sciences "Teaching Excellence Award" from the College Faculty Council in 2014. I spent 3 years, from the Fall of 1999 to the Summer of 2002 as an Associate Dean in charge of the Arts and Sciences curriculum. One of my actions there was to start our First-Year Seminar Program", which I later directed from 2008 to 2017. I have been chair of Computer Science numerous times and have served on more committees than I can recall. I chaired the committee that recruited Sean Decatur to be Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in 2008.
