Phokion Kolaitis, professor of computer science at UC Santa Cruz, has been elected a Foreign Member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters in recognition of his "outstanding academic merits."
Kolaitis was one of five foreign members elected this year to the academy. During the 1990s, he collaborated with Finnish colleagues and traveled frequently to Finland to give talks and teach short courses.
Kolaitis is currently on leave of absence from UCSC at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, where he is the senior manager of the Computer Science Principles and Methodologies Department. His research interests include logic in computer science, database theory, and computational complexity.
A Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Kolaitis has received several IBM Research awards and has held a Guggenheim Fellowship. He earned a diploma in mathematics at the University of Athens and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics at UCLA. He joined the UCSC faculty in 1988.
The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters was founded in 1908 to unite and support Finnish-speaking scientists and scholars in Finland. Devoted to the promotion of scientific and scholarly research, the academy covers the full range of academic disciplines and has been electing foreign members since 1924.
