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CS Chair Fred Schneider Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Dr. Fred Schneider, Chairman of the Department of Computer Science, has joined Cornell faculty members Stephen Coate, María Cristina García, and Suzanne Mettler in being elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The 228 new academy members – accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists, and civic, business and philanthropic leaders – also include singer and philanthropist John Legend, actress Carol Burnett and mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani. They will be inducted Oct. 7 at a ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“It is an honor to welcome this new class of exceptional women and men as part of our distinguished membership,” said Don Randel, former Cornell provost and chair of the academy’s board of directors. “Their talents and expertise will enrich the life of the academy and strengthen our capacity to spread knowledge and understanding in service to the nation.”

Fred B. Schneider ’75, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Computer Science, is a Cornell Engineering alumnus who joined the faculty in 1978 after completing his doctorate at Stony Brook University. His research interests in trustworthy computing and public policy focus on various aspects of systems that will perform as expected, despite failures and attacks; and theory and algorithms for building fault-tolerant distributed systems.

Schneider is the author of “On Concurrent Programming” and co-author of “A Logical Approach to Discrete Mathematics.” He chaired a National Academies Computer Science and Telecommunications Board study that produced the 1999 volume “Trust in Cyberspace.” He has done widely cited work in system security, has testified about cybersecurity research before the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee and the Committee on Science and Technology, served on the Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board (2007-11), and chaired the United Kingdom’s International Review of Research in Computer Science in 2011.

He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1992), the Association of Computing Machinery (1995) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2008), which gave him its 2012 Emanuel R. Piore Award; an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (2011) and was named a foreign member of the Norges Tekniske Vitenskapsakademi (Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences) in 2010. He was named Professor-at-Large at the University of Tromso (Norway) in 1996, and was awarded a Doctor of Science honoris causa by the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2003 for his work in computer dependability and security.