Dr
John J.   Grefenstette

Director of the Public Health Dynamics Laboratory in the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh.

Biography:

The mission of the Public Health Dynamics Lab is to develop interdisciplinary approaches using computational models to improve our understanding of complex public health issues. including the dynamics of infectious disease; development of global open source public health databases; vaccine distribution in developing countries; and racism, segregation, and health disparities. Dr. Grefenstette received his B.S. in Mathematics and Philosophy from Carnegie Mellon University and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh. He was previously on the faculty at George Mason University, where he served as Chair of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Department and as Assistant Dean of the School for Computational Sciences. Dr. Grefenstette has published over 90 research papers in computer science, artificial intelligence, bioinformatics and public health. He was the organizer and Program Chair for the first two International Conferences on Genetic Algorithms, one of the founders of the International Society for Genetic Algorithms, and a founding associate editor for the journal Evolutionary Computation, published by MIT Press since 1993. He is on the editorial board for the journal Adaptive Behavior, and has served as an Editor of the journal Machine Learning. Dr. Grefenstette has been chosen to receive the 2010 Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computational Intelligence Society. He will be presented with the award during the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, July 18-23, 2010, in Barcelona, Spain.

Status: Confirmed