Moshe Vardi, one of the world’s leading computer scientists and a University Professor at Rice, has been elected a Foreign Member of the United Kingdom’s Royal Society.
Known formally as the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, it was founded in 1660 and is the oldest continuously existing scientific academy in the world. Previously elected fellows include Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.
In its announcement, the Royal Society recognized Vardi for his “seminal contributions to the development of logic as a unifying foundational framework and a tool for modeling computational systems. His work has had fundamental and lasting impact on automatic verification, epistemic analysis of multi-agent systems, database theory, and descriptive-complexity theory.”
At Rice, Vardi is the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering. His research interests focus on applications of logic to computer science, including database theory, finite model theory, knowledge in multi-agent systems, and computer-aided verification and reasoning.
Vardi earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1981. After two tenures as a research scientist for IBM Research and continued work at Stanford University, Vardi joined the Rice faculty in 1993.
He has authored or co-authored more than 700 technical papers. He is senior editor of Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), after serving as its editor-in-chief for a decade. He holds honorary doctorates from eight European universities.
Among his many honors are membership in the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences and the Academia Europaea. Vardi is a fellow of the ACM, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Mathematical Society.
New Fellows and Foreign Members are formally admitted to the Royal Society during the Admissions Day ceremony in July. This year, 59 Fellows, 19 Foreign Members and two Honorary Fellows have been elected.
Kyriacos Nicolaou, Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor of Chemistry at Rice, was named a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2013; Ramamoorthy Ramesh, vice president for research, professor of materials science and nanoengineering (MSNE), and professor of physics and astronomy, in 2020; Peter Wolynes, Bullard-Welch Foundation Professor of Chemistry, professor of biosciences, of MSNE, and of physics and astronomy, in 2007.
--Patrick Kurp, Engineering Communications