Carnegie Mellon SCS Dean James Morris to Step Down in 2004

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Office of the Provost
TO: Deans and Department Heads

FROM: Mark Kamlet

DATE: September 18, 2003

SUBJECT: SCS Dean James Morris to Step Down in 2004

Dear Friends,
After four very productive years, Jim Morris tells me he has decided to 
step down at the end of his five-year term as dean of the School of 
Computer Science. He will return to teaching, research and some special 
projects at the end of the school year in 2004.

Under Jim's leadership, SCS has risen to new heights of excellence in 
teaching, research and recognition, During Jim's tenure as dean, SCS has 
been ranked first as a computer science school. Its research revenues have 
increased 50 percent during the last four years and the school's budget now 
tops $100 million.

SCS has broadened the scope of its undergraduate program, continuing to 
make it more attractive to women and giving all students more options 
outside of the basic computer science curriculum. The quality of life for 
students is high, with 30 percent female enrollment in the undergraduate 
program and 98 percent first-year undergraduate retention for all students.

In addition to his achievements within SCS, Jim's progressive thinking has 
had a major impact on the entire university. He headed the original 
initiative to establish our branch campus on the West Coast, enabling 
Carnegie Mellon to become a player in the Silicon Valley and giving our 
students and the university new opportunities for study, internships, and 
interaction with key people and companies in that exciting part of the 
country.

Jim's record of outstanding service to Carnegie Mellon extends back to the 
1980s, when he became the first director of the Information Technology 
Center (ITC), a joint venture with IBM that conceived and engineered the 
university's original "Andrew" project. In the early 1990s, he founded and 
became the first director of SCS' outstanding Human-Computer Interaction 
Institute.


Jim has been a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon since 1982. 
He served as head of the ITC from 1983-88. He took a leave of absence from 
the university in 1990 to found and serve as the first president of MAYA 
Design Group, a consulting firm specializing in product design.
A native of Pittsburgh, he received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from 
Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1963. He earned master's and doctor's 
degrees in management and computer science, respectively, from the 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1963-68. For the next five 
years, he worked as an assistant professor at the University of California 
at Berkeley, where he developed several important underlying principles of 
programming languages. In 1974, he joined the research staff at the Xerox 
Palo Alto Research Center in California. During his eight years at Xerox 
PARC, he worked on the first distributed personal computer system and was a 
co-discoverer of a fast method for locating a phrase inside a large body of 
text. He also managed the Cedar Programming Environment project, one of the 
early software production environments. He returned to Carnegie Mellon in 
1982 as a visiting fellow of Xerox and was recruited to direct the Andrew 
research project.



On November 10, Jim will serve as master of ceremonies at the induction of 
the first group of robots and their inventors into the newly established 
Robot Hall of Fame?, a joint venture of Carnegie Mellon and the Carnegie 
Science Center. It's a concept he conceived, We look forward to more 
exciting ideas and initiatives as Jim continues his career at Carnegie Mellon. 

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