photo of Michael Scott PLP 3e cover

About the Author

Michael L. Scott is a professor and past chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester.  He received his Ph.D. in computer sciences in 1985 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.  His research interests lie at the intersection of programming languages, operating systems, and high level computer architecture, with an emphasis on parallel and distributed computing.  He is the designer of the Lynx distributed programming language and a co-designer of the Charlotte and Psyche parallel operating systems, the Bridge parallel file system, the Cashmere and InterWeave shared memory systems, and the RSTM suite of transactional memory implementations.  His MCS mutual exclusion lock, co-designed with John Mellor-Crummey, is used in a variety of commercial and academic systems.  Several other algorithms, co-designed with Maged Michael, Bill Scherer, and Doug Lea, appear in the java.util.concurrent standard library.  In 2006 he and Dr. Mellor-Crummey shared the ACM SIGACT/SIGOPS Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing. 

Dr. Scott is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.  He has served on a wide variety of program committees and grant review panels, and has been a principal or co-investigator on grants from the NSF, ONR, DARPA, NASA, the Departments of Energy and Defense, the Ford Foundation, Digital Equipment Corporation (now HP), Sun Microsystems, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft.  The author of more than 100 refereed publications, he served as General Chair of the 2003 ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, and as Program Chair of the 2007 ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Transactional Computing and the 2008 ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming.  In 2001 he received the University of Rochester’s Robert and Pamela Goergen Award for Distinguished Achievement and Artistry in Undergraduate Teaching. 


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Last Change: 22 February 2009 / Michael Scott's email address