Professor Neil Immerman was recently appointed as a Guggenheim Fellow. He was recognized with this prestigious fellowship for his contributions to complexity theory, descriptive complexity, and database theory.
“ Neil is a pioneer in theoretical computer science research,” said Department Chair Bruce Croft. “He certainly deserves this honor.”
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced that Immerman, along with three other UMass professors, was a recipient of the seventy-ninth annual competition. Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.
Immerman is one of the key developers of an active research program called descriptive complexity, an approach he is currently applying in model checking, database theory, and computational complexity theory. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University and has been on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts Amherst since 1989. Immerman is an editor of Information and Computation and the Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science. In 1995 he was awarded, jointly with Róbert Szelepcsényi, the Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science.