CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - David E. Goldberg, a professor of general engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been named the first holder of the Jerry S. Dobrovolny Professorship in Entrepreneurial Engineering.
Goldberg received his bachelor's, master's and doctorate in civil engineering from the University of Michigan. He joined the department of general engineering at Illinois in 1990. He received a U.S. National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985 and was named an Associate of the Center for Advanced Study at Illinois in 1995.
He is the founding chairman and a Senior Fellow of the International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation. His book "Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization and Machine Learning" is the fourth most widely cited reference in computer science, according to CiteSeer.
Goldberg is the director of the Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory. His research focuses on the design, analysis and application of genetic algorithms-computer procedures based on the mechanics of natural genetics and selection.
His most recent book, "The Design of Innovation: Lessons From and for Competent Genetic Algorithms," shows how to design scalable genetic algorithms and how such algorithms are similar to certain processes of human innovation.
Dobrovolny was a member of the general engineering department at Illinois for nearly 40 years. He served as department head from 1959 until his retirement in 1987.
Goldberg's investiture took place in late September during a ceremony in the Loomis Laboratory of Physics on the Urbana campus.