Career
He holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, and is the founding Director of the University of Washington eScience Institute. From 2007 to 2013 he served as Founding Chair of the Computing Community Consortium, a national effort to engage the computing research community in fundamental research motivated by tackling societal challenges. Lazowska chaired the Computing Research Association from 1997 to 2001, the National Science Foundation CISE Advisory Committee from 1998 to 1999, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Information Science and Technology Study Group from 2004 to 2006, the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (co-chair with Marc Benioff) from 2003 to 2005, and the Working Group of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology to review the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program in 2010 (co-chair with David East Shaw).
He served as Chair of University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering from 1993 to 2001, a period during which that program consolidated its reputation as one of the top computer science programs in the nation and the world.
He was the Founding Chair of the Computing Community Consortium - a national effort to engage the computing research community in fundamental research motivated by tackling societal challenges - from 2007 to 2013. A long-time advocate for increasing participation in the field, Lazowska serves on the Executive Advisory Council of the National Center for Women & Information Technology, and on the National Research Council"s Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine.
Lazowska has mentored a number of students, including Hank Levy (University of Washington), Yi-Bing Lin (National Chiao Tung University), Tom Anderson (University of Washington), Editor Felten (Princeton University), and Christophe Bisciglia (successively Google, Cloudera, and WibiData). Lazowska was born on August 3, 1950 in Washington, District of Columbia He obtained his Bachelor of Arts at Brown University in 1972, advised by Andries van Dam and David J. Lewis, and his Master of Science in 1974 and Doctor of Philosophy in 1977 at the University of Toronto, advised by Kenneth C. Sevcik.