Michael Fellows
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Michael Ralph Fellows (born June 15, 1952 in Upland, California) is Professor at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Fellows is recognized as one of the founders of Parameterized complexity, a complexity framework that uses structure in hard problems for the design and analysis of algorithms for their solution. Parameterized Complexity has strong connections to algorithmic engineering, and is increasingly important in fields as diverse as Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and Bioinformatics. In 2007, Fellows was awarded a von Humboldt Research Award for his leadership and development of the field. In 1999, he married Frances Novak Rosamond, also a scientist, who shares his love of mathematics and adventure.
Professor Fellows is known for his innovative science communication. His books Computer Science Unplugged! (written with Tim Bell and Ian Witten), and This is MEGA-Mathematics! (with Nancy Casey) convey sophisticated concepts such as intractability, sorting networks, and cryptography. They have won several science popularization awards, and been translated into Spanish, Russian, Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, French, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Urdu, with more translations are underway. Unplugged! will be part of the famous British Fraraday Christmas Lectures in 2008, which will be given by Professor Christopher M. Bishop of UK Microsoft Research.
Mike Fellows received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego in 1985, and his M.A., Mathematics, also from UCSD in 1982. He has taught in the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. In 2007, he became one of the first Fellows of the Institute of Advanced Study (Durham), UK. He has been an Associate Editor for the Journal of Computer and Systems Sciences since 2004, and in 2008 was Guest Editor for a special double issue of The Computer Journal with 15 surveys on Parameterized Complexity. He is a member of the Steering Committee for the conference series International Workshop on Parameterized and Exact Computation, proceedings published by Springer in Lecture Notes in Computer Science. He has published over 150 scientific articles and three books (see DBLP and ACM Authors)and is a popular speaker.
Mike Fellows spent most of the year 2008 at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena, Germany, working with Rolf Niedermeier at the chair for theretical computer science.
