Bio-Sketch

John E. Hopcroft is the IBM Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics in Computer Science at Cornell University and Visiting Chair Professor, Director of CFCS, Turing Advisor at Peking University. From January 1994 until June 2001, he was the Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering. He received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Seattle University (1961). After receiving both his M.S. (1962) and Ph.D. (1964) in electrical engineering from Stanford University, he spent three years on the faculty of Princeton University. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1967, 1967, and he was named professor in 1972 and the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Computer Science in 1985. He served as chairman of the Department of Computer Science from 1987 to 1992 and was the associate dean for college affairs in 1993.

Hopcroft's research centers on theoretical aspects of computing, especially analysis of algorithms, automata theory, and graph algorithms. He has coauthored four books on formal languages and algorithms with Jeffrey D. Ullman and Alfred V. Aho. His most recent work is on the study of information capture and access.

He was honored with the A. M. Turing Award in 1986 "for fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures". He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS, 2009), the National Academy of Engineering (NAE, 1989), a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2017), and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS, 1987), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE, 1987), and the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM, 1994). He was appointed as Einstein Professor of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2010. In 2016, he received the Chinese Government Friendship Award (2016), the highest honor awarded by the Chinese government to foreign experts.