Professor Mitchell Wand Selected as Fellow of the ACM
Mitchell Wand, Professor in Northeastern's College of Computer and Information Science, has been selected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
The ACM, the principal academic organization for the computing field worldwide, annually elects a small group of eminent scholars as Fellows to recognize their leadership in the discipline. Professor Wand was cited in the ACM's announcement for his "contributions to type theory and program analysis."
Within his chosen area of programming languages, Professor Wand's career has been striking for the breadth of his work, which has included important results ranging over mathematical theories of language semantics, models of parallelism and concurrency, and language design. In one of his important papers, Wand showed how advanced type theory could be extended to object-oriented languages. Professor Wand subsequently led a team that produced one of the first completely verified implementations of a programming language -- a topic that has recently enjoyed a resurgence due to renewed interest in securing critical software infrastructure against cyberattack.
Professor Wand has also been a leader in education. *Essentials of Programming Languages*, the textbook he co-authored with his long-time friend and colleague, Professor Dan Friedman of Indiana University, has caused a radical shift in the way the topic is taught. The text is now entering its third edition.