Valedictory: Who Am I?
Martin Tompa (Emeritus, Allen School)
Emeritus Lecture
Thursday, January 4, 2024, 3:30 pm
Abstract
I will address the existential question, "Who am I if I'm not a computer scientist?" I will focus mostly on my passion for genealogy and family history, revealing family secrets few of you know. As suggested by the existential question, the computer science content will be nearly nonexistent, so bring along anyone who might otherwise be turned off by computer science.
Bio
Martin Tompa graduated from Harvard University in 1974 and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1978. For the next 7 years he was here, on the Computer Science faculty at the University of Washington, where he received a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1984, the inaugural year for these awards. From 1985 to 1989, Martin was on the staff of the IBM Research Division at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center and became manager of its Theory of Computation group. In 1989, he rejoined the Computer Science faculty at UW and, in 1998 and 1999, received the first two annual ACM Undergraduate Teaching Awards. In 2001 he became Adjunct Professor of Genome Sciences, and from 2009 to 2013 was Director of the UW's interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Computational Molecular Biology. Martin retired in 2020.
This talk is available on the Allen School's YouTube channel.