CRA hires new executive director

By Dave Patterson
CRA Board Chair

I am delighted to announce that William Aspray recently joined the Computing Research Association as our new executive director. Bill comes highly recommended, with colleagues praising his skills at management and fund-raising. He is also a world-class computer historian, with graduate degrees in history and mathematics and an impressive record of research accomplishments. We believe his research interests will blend well with CRA's mission.

Our previous director, Fred "Rick" Weingarten, will continue part time with CRA working on government affairs. We wish to thank Rick for his outstanding service for the last five years in building CRA to its current reputation within the CS&E research community. Today CRA represents four societies (AAAI, ACM, IEEE/CS and SIAM) and more than 160 academic CS&E departments, industrial laboratories and supercomputer centers.

Bill served as director of the IEEE Center for the History of Electrical Engineering from 1989-96. During his tenure the center relocated to Rutgers University, where it was jointly operated by IEEE and Rutgers. A research program was established, and existing programs in archives and public outreach were expanded. The staff tripled in size, with appointments of strong historians from major research universities. About $750,000 in research grants was raised, and an endowment of $2.7 million was established. Bill simultaneously held a position on the graduate faculty in history, was adviser to the Rutgers program in the history of technology, medicine and science and served as a member of the advisory board for the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture.

Before joining IEEE, Bill was associate director and acting director of the Charles Babbage Institute for the History of Information Processing at the University of Minnesota. Earlier in his career, he held faculty appointments in mathematical and computer sciences at Williams College and in the history of science at Harvard University.

Bill holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics and philosophy from Wesleyan University and a master's degree in mathematics from the same institution. He wrote a master's thesis in algebra before taking additional graduate work in mathematical logic at Princeton University, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. in the history of science from Wisconsin in 1980 with a dissertation on Alan Turing and John von Neumann.

Bill has written or edited 10 books and 50 articles on the histories of computing, mathematics, electrical engineering, engineering management and technological competitiveness. These works include John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing (MIT Press, 1990) and a popular history of the computer commissioned by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (with Martin Campbell-Kelly, Basic Books, forthcoming 1996).