Kenneth De Jong

Kenneth Alan De Jong (born 1944)^[1] is an American computer scientist and professor emeritus at George Mason University.^[2] He is one of the pioneers in evolutionary computation.^[3][4]

Education and career

De Jong was a student of John Henry Holland at the University of Michigan, where he completed a Ph.D. in 1975 with a dissertation on genetic algorithms.^[1][5] He became a faculty member at George Mason University in 1984.^[2]

He is the author of the textbook Evolutionary Computation: A Unified Approach (MIT Press, 2006),^[6] and was the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Evolutionary Computation,^[7] which published its first volume in 1993.^[8]

Recognition

De Jong was the 2005 recipient of the Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.^[4] He is also the recipient of a lifetime achievement award of the Evolutionary Programming Society.^[7] He was a distinguished speaker of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2014.^[9]