Lance Fortnow, Ph.D.

Bio: Lance Fortnow is the inaugural Dean of the College of Computing at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Fortnow received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at MIT in 1989 under the supervision of Michael Sipser. Before he joined Illinois Tech in 2019 as Dean of the College of Science, Fortnow was the chair of the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology and previously was a professor at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

His research focuses on computational complexity, the mathematical understanding of efficient computing. He has been named an ACM Fellow, an NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow from 1992-1998 and a Fulbright Scholar to the Netherlands in 1996-97.  Fortnow has written a popular science book The Golden Ticket: P, NP and the Search for the Impossible, on the major challenges in his field.