Donald F. Towsley

headshot
Position: 
Distinguished University Professor CS
Office: 
CS378
Phone: 
(413) 545-0207

Interests

Networks, performance analysis.

Research

Professor Towsley's research spans a wide range of activities from stochastic analyses of queueing models of computer and telecommunications to the design and conduct of measurement studies. He has performed some of the pioneering work on the exact and approximate analyses of parallel/distributed applications and architectures. More recently, he pioneered the area of network tomography and the use of fluid models for large networks. He has published extensively, with over 150 articles in leading journals.

Biography

PhD Comptuer Science, University of Texas (1975), BA Physics, University of Texas (1971).  Professor Towsley first joined the faculty at the University of Massachuseets in  the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering  in 1976 and moved to the College of Information and Computer Sciences in 1986. He was named University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in 1998.  Professsor Towsley  was a Visiting Scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, (1982-83, 2003), INRIA and AT&T Labs - Research (1996-97), and Cambridge Microsoft Research Lab (2004); a Visiting Professor at the Laboratoire MASI, Paris, (1989-90).

Activities & Awards

Professor Towsley has been an editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and Journal of Dynamic Discrete Event Systems. He is currently on the Editorial boards of Networks and Performance Evaluation. He was a Program Co-chair of the joint ACM SIGMETRICS and PERFORMANCE '92 conference. He is a two-time recipient of the Best paper Award of the ACM Sigmetrics Conference.  He is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the ACM.  He is also a member of ORSA and is active in the IFIP Working Groups 6.3 on Performance Modeling of Networks and 7.3 on Performance Modeling. Towsley is the recipient of one of the IEEE's most prestigious honors, the 2007 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award. He lso received a UMass Amherst Distinguished Faculty Lecturer award in 2002 and a UMass Amherst College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics Faculty Research Award in 2003.