Professor Alberto Apostolico was a professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering and the School of Interactive Computing, in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology.  Prof. Apostolico earned his first degree in electronic engineering from the University of Naples, graduating summa cum laude. He soon completed a second degree in computer science from the University of Salerno (also graduating summa cum laude), then taught in Italy for eight years before coming to the United States as an associate professor at Purdue University in Indiana. He joined Georgia Tech as a professor in 2005.

Prof. Apostolico’s research interests focused in the areas of algorithmic analysis, design, and application. Much of his work dealt with algorithms and data structures for combinatorial pattern matching and discovery problems as arising in text editing, data compression, picture processing, biomolecular sequence analysis, parallel and distributed computation, coding theory, and image processing. Prof. Apostolico conducted research and taught across three continents, jointly secured three industrial patents, held visiting or permanent appointments at 17 universities throughout his career, founded and steered notable international conferences, and published no less than 177 books, articles and papers in his lifetime. 

Prof. Apostolico’s contributions to computational science are well-documented through editing a number of books, 84 journal articles, 73 conference papers, and other writings that he leaves to posterity. He and Galil co-edited volumes of the Combinatorial Algorithms on Words (Springer-Verlag) and Pattern Matching Algorithms (Oxford University Press). In all, Apostolico and Galil co-wrote a number of papers, and Apostolico continued to explore the “Boyer-Moore-Galil String Searching Strategies” throughout his career.

In addition to teaching and conducting research at Georgia Tech, Prof. Apostolico held visiting and permanent appointments at Carnegie Mellon, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Purdue, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center; in Europe at University of Salerno, University of L' Aquila, University of Padova, IASI at Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, University of Paris, University of London, King's College, Zif-Bielefeld Center for Interdisciplinary Research, and Renyi-Hungarian Academy of Sciences; and in Asia at IMS of the National University of Singapore, Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai, and Korea University.

Apostolico was the (co-) recipient of research grants from seven nations and multi-national organizations such as Fulbright, NATO, and ESPRIT. In 2006, he was one of four scientists assigned to the B. Segre Interdisciplinary Institute of Accademia dei Lincei  ("Galileus' Academy") in Rome, and was dedicated a special issue by Theoretical Computer Science, the journal of the European Association for TCS.

He was a boundless contributor to the international conference circuit. He was a founding member of the steering committee of the International Symposia on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM). Prof. Apostolico also served on the steering committees of the International Conferences on Discovery Science and the Symposia on String Processing and Information Retrieval. He was founding executive committee member of the Fibonacci Institute for the Foundations of Computer Science and of the MSE Program in Software Engineering. He held leadership roles at many international conferences, including Research in Computational Biology (RECOMB), Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI), IEEE Data Compression Conference, String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE), and Combinatorial Pattern Matching. (CPM).