Alfred V. Aho is Lawrence Gussman Professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University. He served as Chair of the department from 1995 to 1997, and in the spring of 2003.

Professor Aho has a B.A.Sc in Engineering Physics from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science from Princeton University.

Professor Aho won the Great Teacher Award for 2003 from the Society of Columbia Graduates.

Professor Aho has won the IEEE John von Neumann Medal and is a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Helsinki and Waterloo, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, ACM, Bell Labs, and IEEE.

Professor Aho is well known for his many papers and books on algorithms and data structures, programming languages, compilers, and the foundations of computer science. His book coauthors include John Hopcroft, Brian Kernighan, Monica Lam, Ravi Sethi, Jeff Ullman, and Peter Weinberger.

Professor Aho is the "A" in AWK, a widely used pattern-matching language; "W" is Peter Weinberger and "K" is Brian Kernighan. (Think of AWK as the initial pure version of perl.) He also wrote the initial versions of the string pattern-matching programs egrep and fgrep that first appeared on UNIX.

Professor Aho's current research interests include programming languages, compilers, algorithms, software engineering, and quantum computers.

Professor Aho has served as Chair of ACM's Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computability Theory, and Chair of the Advisory Committee for the National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate. He is currently the coeditor-in-chief of the contributed articles section of the Communications of the ACM.

Prior to his current position at Columbia, Professor Aho was Vice President of the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, the lab that invented UNIX, C and C++. He was also a member of technical staff, department head, and director of this center. Professor Aho was also the General Manager of the Information Sciences and Technologies Research Laboratory at Bellcore (now Telcordia).

Professor Aho plays bridge, golf, and the violin in a string quartet. He likes skiing on soft snow.