Roberto Tamassia is anAmerican-Italiancomputer scientist, the Plastech Professor of Computer Science atBrown University, and served as the chair of the Brown Computer Science department from 2007 to 2014.[1] His research specialty is in the design and analysis ofalgorithms forgraph drawing,computational geometry, andcomputer security. He is also the author of several textbooks.
Tamassia received alaurea (the Italian equivalent of an M.S. degree) from theUniversity of Rome "La Sapienza" in 1984, and a Ph.D. from theUniversity of Illinois Urbana-Champaign under the supervision ofFranco Preparata in 1988.[1][2] He then took a faculty position at Brown; he has also held visiting positions at theUniversity of Texas at Dallas, theConsiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, and La Sapienza.[1]
Tamassia is anISI highly cited researcher.[3] He was one of the original organizers of theInternational Symposium on Graph Drawing, and was co-chair of that conference in 1994; he has also been co-chair of the semiannualWorkshop on Algorithms and Data Structures (1997, 1999, and 2001) and the annual Workshop on Algorithms and Experiments (2005). He is founding editor-in-chief (since 1996) of theJournal of Graph Algorithms and Applications[4] as well as belonging to several other journal editorial boards.
In 2006, theIEEE Computer Society gave Tamassia their Technical Achievement Award "for pioneering the field of graph drawing and for outstanding contributions to the design of graph and geometric algorithms."[1][5] In 2008, he was elected as anIEEE Fellow.[1][6][7] In 2012 he was named a fellow of theAssociation for Computing Machinery "for contributions to graph drawing, algorithms and data structures and to computer science education",[8] and also named a fellow of theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science.[9]
Tamassia was married toIsabel Cruz, also a noted computer scientist, until her death in 2021.[10]
