One of the highest honors the campus can bestow, named appointments to chairs, professorships, scholars, and fellows acknowledge outstanding faculty research, service, and education accomplishments. In the coming weeks, seven Illinois Computer Science faculty—Jeff Erickson, Svetlana Lazebnik, Craig Zilles, Tarek Abdelzaher, Carl Gunter (GSP Theme Leader), Geoffrey Herman, and Klara Nahrstedt—will receive these titles for the 2021 and 2022 academic years. The investiture process is possible thanks to the generosity of Engineering and CS alumni and friends.

On April 27th, Erickson was invested as the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Professor, Lazebnik as the Donald Biggar Willett Faculty Scholar, and Zilles as the Severns Faculty Scholar. On May 11, Abdelzaher was invested as the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Professor in Computer Science, Gunter as the George and Ann Fisher Distinguished Professor, Herman as the Severns Teaching Associate Professor, and Nahrstedt as the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering.

Carl A. Gunter is the George and Ann Fisher Distinguished Professor in Engineering in the Computer Science Department of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He also serves as the director of Illinois Security Lab, lead of the Genomic Security and Privacy Theme at the Institute for Genomic Biology, and the founding chair for the Security and Privacy Area of the Department of Computer Science.

After receiving his BA from the University of Chicago (1979), Gunter went on to earn his PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison (1985). He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Cambridge in England before joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1987 and then UIUC in 2004.

Gunter has made research contributions in the semantics of programming languages, formal methods, security, and privacy. His contributions to the semantics of programming languages include the interpretation of subtypes using implicit coercions, type inference for continuations and prompts, the use of Grothendieck fibrations as a model of parametric polymorphism, the mixed powerdomain, and the use of Petri nets as a model of linear logic.

His 1992 textbook and his chapter in the Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science (1990) are standard references on the semantics of programming languages. Gunter’s recent research focuses on security and privacy issues for the electric power grid and healthcare information technologies.