Martín Farach-Colton adds Leonard J. Shustek Professor of Computer Science to his list of titles

An endowed professorship is among the highest honors a faculty member can have bestowed upon them by a school, as a demonstration of excellence in their respective field. Given that, it’s no surprise that Martín Farach-Colton, who chairs Tandon’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering, describes himself as “thrilled and honored” to hold the Leonard J. Shustek Professorship. The professorship serves, in effect, to celebrate both donor and recipient: two acknowledged leaders in their fields.

Farach-Colton, who was recently elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is an expert on big data algorithmics, storage systems, data structures, and streaming algorithms. His latest peer-reviewed works involve addressing the shortcomings of translation lookaside buffers (TLBs), a type of memory cache — research that won him a distinguished paper award at the ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS); giving the fastest key-value store for persistent memory systems, which is a new type of RAM; and devising a hash table that simultaneously offers the strongest known guarantees on a large number of core properties; among other projects.

The alumnus who endowed the professorship, Leonard J. Shustek, presciently launched Nestar Systems, an early developer of networks for personal computers, in the late 1970s and is now widely revered as the founder of the Computer History Museum, home to the largest and most significant collection of computing artifacts in the world. 

Shustek now serves as the founding chairman emeritus of the museum’s board of trustees, and Farach-Colton is excited about the prospect of visiting him in Mountain View, California. “I’m obviously very grateful,” Farach-Colton says, “and hope that I can be a credit to the title bearing his name.”