Alfred V. Aho became Associate Research Vice President, Communications Sciences Research, at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, in June, 1997. Prior to this appointment, he was Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department at Columbia University from 1995 to 1997, and from 1991 to 1995 he was the General Manager of the Information Sciences and Technologies Research Laboratory at laboratory was directed at advancing the national information networking infrastructure. From 1987 to 1991 he was Director of the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey. Inventions of this center include the UNIX operating system and the C and C++ programming languages.

Dr. Aho received a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Physics from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (Computer Science) from Princeton University. Upon graduating from Princeton, Dr. Aho joined Bell Laboratories in 1967 as a Member of Technical Staff in the Computing Techniques Research Department, and in 1980, was appointed Head of the Computing Principles Research Department. He has also been an adjunct professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and at the Stevens Institute of Technology.

Dr. Aho's personal research is centered on data networking, multimedia information systems, database systems and query languages, programming languages and their compilers, algorithms and the theory of computing. He has published more than sixty technical papers in these areas and ten textbooks that are widely used worldwide in computer science research and education. He is a co-inventor of the AWK programming language and other UNIX system tools.

Dr. Aho has received numerous awards. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is a Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science, of the ACM, of Bell Laboratories, and of the IEEE. He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Helsinki and the University of Waterloo for his contributions to computer science research. He has been a Distinguished Lecturer at many of the world's leading universities.

Dr. Aho is active on a number of national and international advisory boards and committees. He has served as Chairman of the Advisory Committee for the Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation. He has also been Chairman of ACM's Special Interest Group on Automata and Computability Theory and a member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council.