Contact Information

University of Washington
Boeing Professor of Computer Science and Engineering

ladner@cs.washington.edu
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/ladner/
Seattle WA 98117

Biography

Richard E. Ladner, Professor in Computer Science & Engineering, graduated from St. Mary's College of California with a B.S. in 1965 and received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971, at which time he joined the faculty of the University of Washington. In addition to his appointment in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, he is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and in the Department of Linguistics.

After many years of research in theoretical computer science, he has turned his attention to accessibility technology research, especially technology for deaf, deaf-blind, hard-of-hearing, and blind people. He continues to work in design and analysis of algorithms, cache performance of algorithms, network algorithms for media-on-demand, and data compression algorithms. He has continuing interests in automata-based computational complexity theory and distributed computing.

He has supervised or co-supervised twenty-six students on their Ph.D. dissertations and seven on their M.S. theses. He has supervised numerous undergraduate research projects, including projects of two students who received the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award. From 1994 to 2005, as part of the DO-IT Project, he held a one-week summer workshop for disabled high school students, encouraging them to pursue college programs and careers in science, mathematics, and engineering. In 2006 he organized the Vertical Mentoring Workshop for the Blind in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. He organized the Summer Academy for Advancing Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Computing in 2007-2013. In 2014 he organized the Empowering Blind Students in Science and Engineering Workshop.

He has served as an Area Editor for the Journal of the Association of Computing Machinery, Editor for SIAM Journal on Computing, an Associate Editor for the Journal of Computer and System Sciences, and Theory of Computing Systems. He is currently on the Editorial Boards for ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing and Communications of the ACM.

Richard was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985-86 and a Fulbright Scholar in 1993. He served as Pacific Region Representative on the Council of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). He served as Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group in Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) from 2005-2009. He is an ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow. He is a recipient of the 2004 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM). He is the recipient of the 2008 Computing Research Association's A. Nico Habermann Award. He is a winner of a 2008 Purpose Prize. He was the Outstanding Service Award winner at the University of Washington in 2009. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Gallaudet University.

Richard can often be found holding office hours at the driving range, where he is trying to perfect his golf swing. He is fluent in American Sign Language and computer science theorese.

[REF: http://www.cs.washington.edu/people/faculty/ladner/ ]