Maurice Herlihy Receives Honorary Doctorates From Technion And Università della Svizzera italiana
- Posted by Robayet Hossain
- on April 21, 2025
In the space of a month, Brown CS faculty member Maurice Herlihy will be awarded honorary doctorates from two different institutions: Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), located in Haifa, Israel, and Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano, Switzerland. Technion will confer upon him the title of Doctor Honoris Causa on June 9, during its annual Board of Governors meeting, while USI will present him with the honorary doctorate on May 10, during its Dies Academicus ceremony.
“The decision to confer this honorary award upon you is in recognition of your fundamental contributions to the fields of parallel and distributed computing and in gratitude for your deep dedication to the State of Israel, Israeli academia, and the Technion,” wrote Technion President and professor Uri Sivan in his letter to Maurice.
Maurice’s research has advanced the field of concurrent computing, particularly in non-blocking synchronization, wait-free data structures, and transactional memory. His work on hardware primitives for synchronization has led to widely adopted techniques that enhance the performance and reliability of multi-core processors. Over the years, his contributions have influenced both theoretical advancements and practical implementations in computer architecture, database systems, and distributed computing.
In recent years, Herlihy has been recognized with numerous honors, including becoming an inaugural CNRS Fellow-Ambassadeur in 2023. He has won the Dijkstra Prize three times, most recently in 2022. These latest honorary degrees place him among a distinguished group of past Technion recipients, including Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Angela Merkel.
“I am pleased and honored by these recognitions,” Maurice says. “When I began my career, distributed computing was viewed as a branch of science fiction, and it is gratifying to see my community's visions become validated in this way.”
For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.
