On January 22, 2000, the department honored Professor James C. Browne with a symposium on the event of his 65th birthday. He is known as an energetic teacher and researcher who has published over 225 papers spanning many topics in Computer Science and Physics. He has directly supervised 125 graduate students - 62 of whom have completed doctoral degrees under his supervision and another 63 who have completed masters degrees. Brown holds the Regents Chair in Computer Sciences and appointments as Professor of Physics and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has on three occasions (196869, 197175, 198487) served as department chairman. He received his B.A. from Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, and his Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin.
Browne has the rare distinction of having attained Fellow status in the major professional societies of two disciplines: American Physical Society, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the British Computer Society. He has served on the editorial boards of several professional journals, numerous program committees and was chairman of the ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems from 197476. Browne has served on the advisory committees of many government agencies and laboratories including NSF and DARPA.
He was a major contributor to the development of computer systems and services for the university - serving on the Faculty Computer Committee, which guided campus computing policy for 20 years and as its chairman for 10 years. He was active in the business side of computer technology - founding SES (now called Hyperformix), which is a leading supplier of tools and services for designing computer systems to meet performance requirements. He was active in the recruitment of high technology companies to Austin in the 1970s and 1980s.
Browne's research interests have spanned operating systems, performance analysis, databases, software and programming systems, scientific computation, and parallel architectures/algorithms. The persistent theme over the last 20 years has been parallel programming and parallel computations.