Short Biography of Richard Ladner

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.

After many years of research in theoretical computer science he has turned his attention to accessibility technology research, especially technology for deaf, deaf-blind, hard-of-hearing, and blind people. He continues to work in design and analysis of algorithms, cache performance of algorithms, network algorithms for media-on-demand, data compression algorithms. 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. From 1994 to 2005, as part of the DO-IT Project, he held a one week summer workshop for disabled high school students encouraging them to pursue college programs and careers in science, mathematics, and engineering. In 2006 he organized the Vertical Mentoring Workshop for the Blind in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. In 2007 he organized the Summer Academy for Advancing Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Computing.

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 and ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing.

He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985-86 and a Fulbright Scholar in 1993. 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). He is the recipient of the 2008 Computing Research Association's A. Nico Habermann Award. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Gallaudet University.

He can often be found holding office hours at the driving range where he is trying to perfect golf swing. He is fluent in American Sign Language and computer science theorese.

Photo of Richard E. Ladner in Berkely, circa 1968

Berkeley, 1968

Photo of Richard E. Ladner with Welsh corgi named Ginger at Mt. St. Helens, circa 1995

With Ginger at Mt. St. Helens, 1995