Towsley receives ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award

Distinguished Professor Don Towsley is the recipient of the 2007 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Measurement and Evaluation (SIGMETRICS) Achievement Award in recognition of his sustained and continuous record of truly outstanding research achievements over a career of nearly three decades. ACM SIGMETRICS called Towsley a pioneer and a leading scholar in the area of computer modeling and analysis, with applications to networking and computer systems.

Recent research by Towsley includes pioneering work in developing techniques for analyzing the propagation of Internet viruses and worms. He is also responsible for some of the most notable results obtained in networking research in the last few years, including the analytical evaluation of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) throughput. TCP allows computers on a network like the Internet to create reliable connections and exchange data.

Over the past 30 years, Towsley has developed foundational modeling and analysis techniques used by researchers throughout the world to model, predict and better understand the performance of computer and communication systems. Towsley is responsible for seminal work in network tomography, sample path analysis of networks and analytical Transmission Control Protocol modeling. He currently co-directs the Networking Research Laboratory with Distinguished Professor Jim Kurose.

In addition to the SIGMETRICS Award, Dr. Towsley received the prestigious 2007 IEEE Kobayashi Computer and Communications Award, the 1999 IEEE Communications Society William Bennett Award, and several conference/workshop best paper awards. He also received the Chancellor’s Medal in 2001-2002 and an Outstanding Research Award from the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.

Towsley is one of the founders of the Computer Performance Foundation and has twice received the IBM Faculty Fellowship Award. He is a fellow of the IEEE and the ACM. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the ACM andthe IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications. He is Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. Towsley is the chair of the International Federation for Information Processing Working Group 7.3 on computer performance, measurement, modeling and analysis. He received a bachelor’s degree in physics and a doctorate in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin before joining the Amherst campus faculty in 1976.