Moshe Y. Vardi

Early Life and Education

Moshe Ya'akov Vardi was born in 1954 in Israel. He pursued his undergraduate studies at Bar-Ilan University and later received his Master of Science degree from the Weizmann Institute of Science. Vardi completed his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1981 under the supervision of Catriel Beeri. His doctoral thesis was titled "The Implication Problem for Data Dependencies in the Relational Model" (Mathematics Genealogy Project).

Career and Research

Moshe Vardi has had a distinguished career in both academia and industry. He began his postdoctoral research at Stanford University and later joined IBM Research. In 1993, Vardi joined Rice University, where he served as the chair of the computer science department from January 1994 until June 2002.

At Rice University, Vardi holds the title of Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering. He also serves as a faculty advisor for the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Research Interests

Vardi's research interests lie in the applications of logic to computer science. His work encompasses several specialized areas, including:

Publications and Editorial Work

Vardi has authored or co-authored over 700 technical papers and edited several collections. He is known for his books, including:

Reasoning About Knowledge (co-authored with Ronald Fagin, Joseph Halpern, and Yoram Moses)
Finite Model Theory and Its Applications (co-authored with Erich Grädel, Phokion G. Kolaitis, Leonid Libkin, Maarten Marx, Joel Spencer, Yde Venema, and Scott Weinstein)

Vardi served as the editor-in-chief of Communications of the ACM for a decade and is currently a senior editor.

Awards and Honors

Moshe Vardi has received numerous awards and honors throughout his career. Some of the notable ones include:

IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards: Three times recipient
Gödel Prize: Co-winner in 2000 for work on temporal logic with finite automata (Gödel Prize)
Paris Kanellakis Award: Co-winner in 2005 (Paris Kanellakis Award)
Knuth Prize: Winner in 2021 (Knuth Prize)
Harry H. Goode Memorial Award: Recipient in 2011 (Harry H. Goode Memorial Award)
ACM Presidential Award: Recipient in 2008 and 2017
Blaise Pascal Medal: In computational science, awarded by the European Academy of Sciences in 2008
Distinguished Service Award: From the Computing Research Association in 2010
Alonzo Church Award: For Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation

Fellowships and Memberships

Guggenheim Fellow
ACM Fellow
AAAI Fellow
Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS)
Member of the US National Academy of Sciences (National Academy of Sciences)
Member of the US National Academy of Engineering
Member of the Academia Europaea (Academia Europaea)
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (for contributions to the development and use of mathematical logic in computer science)

Honorary Doctorates

Vardi holds honorary doctorates from eight universities, including:

Saarland University, Germany
University of Orléans
Grenoble Alpes University (UGA), France
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil
University of Liège, Belgium
TU Wien, Austria
University of Edinburgh, Scotland
University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Personal Life

Moshe Vardi resides in Houston, Texas, with his wife Pamela Geyer. His step-son, Aaron Hertzmann, is also a computer scientist at Adobe Research.

For more detailed information, visit Moshe Vardi's faculty profile on Rice University's website and his Google Scholar page.

Dr. Moshe Vardi

Biography