Bio: Richard E. Ladner, Boeing Professor in Computer Science and 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 and Engineering, he is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and in the Department of Linguistics.
He has a number of research interests, most of them in theoretical computer science and access technology. He is currently investigating design and analysis of algorithms, cache performance of algorithms, network algorithms for media-on-demand, data compression algorithms, and access technology for disabled persons. He has continuing interests in automata based computational complexity theory and distributed computing.
He has supervised or co-supervised seventeen students on their Ph.D. dissertations and six on their M.S. theses. He has supervised numerous undergraduate research projects and coordinates the Undergraduate Research Seminar in CSE. Since 1994, as part of the DO-IT Project, he has held a one week summer workshop for disabled high school students encouraging them to pursue college programs and careers in science, mathematics, and engineering.
He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985-86 and a Fulbright Scholar in 1993. He has served as an Area Editor for the Journal of the Association of Computing Machinery, Editor for SIAM Journal on Computing, and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Computer and System Sciences. He is currently on the Editorial Board for Theory of Computing Systems. He has served as Pacific Region Representative on the Council of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). He is currently Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group in Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT). He is a Fellow of the ACM. He is a recipient of the 2004 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM).