John E. Savage is the Brown University An Wang Professor Emeritus of Computer Science. He earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1965 after which he joined Bell Laboratories. He moved to Brown University in 1967 where he co-founded the Department of Computer Science in 1979 and served as its second chair. At Brown he chaired the Faculty Executive Committee twice, the 2002-2003 Task Force on Faculty Governance, and many other committees.
He has done research on coding and communications theory, theoretical computer science, VLSI theory, silicon compilation, scientific computing, computational nanotechnology, the performance of multicore chips, I/O complexity, reliable computing with unreliable elements, and cybersecurity policy. He has published more than 100 research articles and given more than 185 invited presentations. He authored two books on theoretical computer science (1976 and 1998), co-authored one on computer literacy (1986) and another on cybersecurity policy and technology (to appear in 2023). He co-edited one volume on VLSI research and parallel algorithms.
He was a member of the MIT Corporation Visiting Committee for EECS from 1991-2002 and served as a Jefferson Science Fellow in the Cyber Affairs Office in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) of the U.S. State Department from August 2009 to August 2010. In the latter capacity he represented the State Department on interagency panels with the White House, the Commerce Department, and the Intelligence Community. In 2011 he gave testimony on cybersecurity before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism. He has served on many academic site visit committees, US agency proposal review committees, a presidential tenure review committee at Harvard (1991), and three NEASC university accreditation committees. He is currently a member of the advisory board of the Verified Voting Foundation.
He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Life Fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a Guggenheim Fellow, a Jefferson Science Fellow, and a recipient of a Fulbright-Hays Research Award. He was a Professorial Fellow at the EastWest Institute from 2014 until its demise in 2021. In 2015 he served as a member of Governor Raimondo’s Rhode Island Cybersecurity Commission. He is currently a member of the advisory board of the Verified Voting Foundation.
