Henry M. Levy, professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, has been named to a new endowed chair created with a gift from a local philanthropist couple.
Benjamin Slivka and Lisa Wissner-Slivka gave $1 million 鈥� an amount that was matched with a half million dollars through a pool of funding donated to augment gifts to the University 鈥� to create the Wissner-Slivka Endowed Chair in Computer Science & Engineering.
The gift is the latest in a string of supporting donations responsible for providing a new state-of-the-art home for the department, the recently opened Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering, and building the resources necessary for faculty and students to do cutting-edge work, said Department Chair David Notkin.
The Allen Center was made possible through a public-private partnership: $10 million from the state, $20 million from the 91探花and $42 million from more than 250 friends and alumni. With the facility in place, Notkin said, the main focus now is what drives the program: the people.
Denice Denton, dean of the College of Engineering, agreed.
鈥淓ndowed chairs and endowed professorships are critical,鈥� Denton said. 鈥淔aculty are the most important element in providing a first-rate learning experience for students and an environment that fosters innovation. Endowed positions enable us to reward our best faculty with discretionary 鈥榲enture funding鈥� that supports entrepreneurial ideas and encourages faculty to do even greater work.鈥�
Levy鈥檚 work has spanned the entire spectrum of computer system design. In the early 1990s, he and colleagues developed novel techniques that influenced a number of commercial operating systems. In the mid-1990s, he, with Susan Eggers and a group of students, invented simultaneous multithreading, which makes it possible for modern processors to execute multiple instructions from multiple programs in a single cycle. The technique, consider one of the most important computer architecture innovations in the past decade, has been adopted by several CPU vendors, including Intel and IBM.
Slivka and Wissner-Slivka met at Northwestern University, where Slivka earned his bachelor鈥檚 degree in 1982 and a master鈥檚 in 1985. A native of the Mount Baker neighborhood of Seattle and a graduate of Garfield High School, Slivka worked at Microsoft for 14 years on numerous projects, including starting the Internet Explorer team and leading it through the release of Internet Explorer 3.0. He retired in 2000, after a brief time at Amazon.com, to focus on family and philanthropy.
Wissner-Slivka earned a bachelor鈥檚 degree from Northwestern and an MBA from the UW, and worked at Microsoft for six years as a program manager and product manager. She serves on numerous local boards, and earlier this year ran in her fourth marathon 鈥� the 2004 New York City Marathon.