Brian W. Kernighan

Brian W. Kernighan received his BASc from the University of Toronto in 1964 and a PhD in electrical engineering from Princeton in 1969. He was a member of the Computing Science Research center at Bell Labs until 2000, and is now a professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton. He was a co-creator of several programming languages, including AWK, AMPL, and a number of tools for document preparation. He is the co-author of 10 books and some technical papers, and holds 4 patents. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2002. His research areas include programming languages, tools and interfaces that make computers easier to use, often for non-specialist users. He is also interested in technology education for non-technical audiences.