Computer Scientist to Receive Prestigious Humboldt Research Award

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Alan Selman, Ph.D., professor of computer science and engineering in the University at Buffalo's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has been selected to receive a prestigious Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany.

The Humboldt Research Award honors the lifetime academic achievements of internationally recognized scientists and scholars from outside of Germany. The foundation awards up to 100 such awards annually.

Selman, a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities, plans to use his Humboldt award to conduct research in computational complexity at the University of Wuerzburg.

According to Selman, the goal of computational complexity is to provide mechanisms for classifying combinatorial problems and measuring the computational resources necessary to solve them.

Modern cryptography, which ensures the security of sensitive commercial and governmental transactions, is based on some of the principles of complexity theory.

Selman joined the UB faculty in 1990 as chair of the Department of Computer Science, serving in the post until 1996. Previously, he was a professor at Northeastern University.

He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa; Sigma Xi, the scientific honorary society, and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science.

A fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, Selman received the organization's ACM-SIGACT Distinguished Service Award.

He is the recipient of an Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society Meritorious Service Award and he founded the IEEE's Computer Society Conference on Structure in Complexity Theory.

Selman also was honored at the 16th Annual IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity in 2001 with a special session on his work.

He spent a year at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, on a Fulbright Award. He also won a Promotion of Science Invitation Fellowship from the Japan Society in 1996.

Selman resides in Williamsville.