Following a year-long national search, Georgia Tech’s College of Computing has hired renowned computing leaders Lance Fortnow and Annie Antón to chair its schools of Computer Science and Interactive Computing, respectively, effective July 1.

Fortnow, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University, and Antón, professor of computer science at North Carolina State University (NCSU), will become the second chairs ever to lead the two College of Computing units, which were elevated to school status in 2007. They replace current Computer Science (CS) chair Ellen Zegura and Interactive Computing (IC) chair Aaron Bobick, who will return to their faculty roles as professors in the two schools.

“We are thrilled that Professors Fortnow and Antón have agreed to come to Georgia Tech to lead our two original schools,” said Zvi Galil, John P. Imlay Jr. Dean of Computing. “The College of Computing is poised to expand the ranks of the very best computing programs in the world, and Annie and Lance are going to help us do it. Both of them share our ambitious vision for Georgia Tech to play a major role in setting the global agenda for this new digital era and continue pushing the boundaries of computing itself.”

Fortnow received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from MIT in 1989, after earning his B.A. in mathematics and computer science from Cornell University in 1985. In addition to his primary faculty appointment at Northwestern, he also has a courtesy appointment at the Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences department in the Kellogg Graduate School of Management and an adjoint professorship at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. Fortnow's research spans computational complexity and its applications, most recently to micro-economic theory.

“I’m excited to join Georgia Tech, a leading center for computer science, at a time when computing is making such a great impact in science and society,” Fortnow said. “I look forward to helping Georgia Tech forge the future of computer science.”

Antón earned three computing degrees from Georgia Tech, completing her B.S. in 1990, M.S. in 1992 and Ph.D. in 1997. Antón is vice-chair of the U.S. Association for Computing Machinery Public Policy Council and has served the national defense and intelligence communities in a number of roles since being selected for the IDA/DARPA Defense Science Study Group in 2005-2006. Her current research focuses on the specification of complete, correct behavior of software systems that must comply with privacy and security regulations. She is founder and director of ThePrivacyPlace.org.

“The School of Interactive Computing––the only school of its kind in the nation––is a unique resource for Georgia Tech and the country,” Antón said. “Computers today interact with the human and physical environments.  Advancing the state of the interactive art is a noble mission for the School.  I am honored to return to ‘Ma Tech’ and to partner with Dean Galil and the entire Georgia Tech community in aspiring to and achieving new levels of excellence.”

Georgia Tech’s schools of CS and IC, together with their sister School of Computational Science and Engineering, form the major academic units of the 21-year-old College of Computing. The School of CS represents foundational areas of computer science, such as networking, information security, software engineering, databases and others. The School of IC’s stated mission is to “redefine the human experience in computing” through education and research in such areas as human-computer interaction, robotics and intelligent systems, computing education, graphics and animation, social computing, augmented environments, and others.