Neil Immerman

Neil Immerman is a Professor of Computer Science in the College of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA.  In three years he earned his BS and MS in mathematics from Yale University. Then he took a year off, working for GTE Sylvania programming early computer controled telephone switches.  His program, which controlled 96 phone lines, ran on a PDP 8 that had only 4K bytes of memory. Immerman spent 5 years at Cornell University, starting in Mathematical Logic but finishing his PhD in Theoretical Computer Science.  In his thesis he created, Descriptive Complexity, showing that all important computational complexity classes have natural characterizations in logic.   

Immerman has continued his research applying logic to several areas of computer science including computatonal complexity theory, database theory, model checking and static analysis.  Before his current position, he has taught at Tufts University and Yale Univesity, and has had visiting appointments at  MSRI in Berkeley, Cornell University, the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University.

Immerman is the winner, jointly with Robert Szelepcsnyi, of the 1995 Goedel Prize in theoretical computer science. He is an editor of Logical Methods in Computer Science and of the Complexity Column of the SIGLOG newsletter.  He is an ACM Fellow (elected in 2002) and a Guggenheim Fellow (2003-04).