Jan Vitek (Northeastern University, formerly Purdue University) has been appointed as an Honorary Professor at the University of Kent starting from November 2014 until October 2019.
The title of Honorary Professor is conferred upon distinguished individuals from related fields of academic research.
Jan is very well known for his research in programming languages. His work has included type theory (ownership types, confined types); dynamic languages such as JavaScript, R and a next generation scripting language, Thorn, developed with IBM; language implementation (flexible dispatching, compact type encoding); real-time Java (the first real-time Java to be deployed on a Boeing UAV, real-time garbage collection); concurrency (benchmarking, transactional memory); security (extensions of pi-calculus, intrusion detection); calculi for mobile computation; and rigour in experimental computer science.
Jan has published over 120 referred papers, and has chaired many leading conferences including COORDINATION, ECOOP, ESOP, ISMM, JTRes, LCTES, PLDI, TOOLS Europe, VEE. He is currently the Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages.