Daniel E. Cooke

Inventor of the SequenceL functional programming language, Cooke discovered the computational laws that led to its creation and implemented several early interpreters for the language. During his tenure at Texas Tech University, he served as chairman of the Department of Computer Science from 2001–2005 and was awarded the prestigious Paul Whitfield Horn Professorship, the highest academic honor given to professors who demonstrate extraordinary standards of teaching and research excellence. He was also the director of Texas Tech's Center for Advanced Intelligent Systems and served as the Manager of NASA's Intelligent Systems Program, a national research initiative in computer science aimed at NASA relevant problems.

From 1990 onward, Dr. Cooke published more than 95 technical papers in the areas of computer language design and software engineering. He served as PI or Co-PI on research grants totaling more than $14M, edited many journal special issues, published a book on Computer Language Design, edited a book on Computer Aided Software Engineering, and served as chair or vice-chair for more than 20 international conferences or workshops. Cooke also served as the Software Engineering Area Editor for IEEE Computer, the Formal Methods Area Editor of the International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, and as an editor of the International Journal of Semantic Computing.

Dr. Cooke was an American Electronics Association Fellow, a MacIntosh-Murchison Faculty Fellow, and held the MacIntosh-Murchison Chair in Engineering at U.T. El Paso. In 1996 he was the recipient of the University of Texas at El Paso's Distinguished Achievement in Research Award. In 2001, Cooke received the NASA Ames Research Center Information Sciences Award for leadership in establishing a Model Strategic Research Initiative for NASA. In 2002, he received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal and the NASA Group Award, and in 2006 he was the recipient of the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Achievement Award for work on SequenceL.