Andries van Dam (Andy) has been on Brown's faculty since 1965, and was one of the Computer Science Department's co-founders and its first Chairman, from 1979 to 1985. He was a Principal Investigator and was the Director from 1996-1998 in the NSF Science and Technology Center for Graphics and Visualization, a research consortium including Brown, Caltech, Cornell, North Carolina (Chapel Hill), and the University of Utah. He served as Brown's first Vice President for Research from 2002-2006. Hereceived his B.S. degree with Honors in Engineering Sciences from Swarthmore College in 1960 and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963 and 1966, respectively.

Andy's main interest is in interactive computer graphics, as reflected in his first technical paper: "Computer-Driven Displays and their Use in Man-Machine Interaction (1966)". The Brown Graphics Group is the longest continuously running graphics research group in the world, and CS123, Introduction to Computer Graphics, is similarly the longest-running graphics course. The long-term research goal of the Brown University Graphics Group is to develop human-centered, powerful, and interactive 3D graphics tools for modeling, scientific visualization, telecollaboration, and interactive illustrations. For nearly two decades Andy has been most interested in post-WIMP UI's, including Virtual Reality and pen- and touch-computing.

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