David A. Gustafson has taught and researched computer science (CS) for over 40 years. As an undergraduate in mathematics at the University of Minnesota, he wrote his first computer program on a CDC 1604 in machine code. While serving in the United States Air Force (USAF) as a weather forecaster—he received his bachelor of science in meteorology from the University of Utah—he wrote programs on the SAGE Q7 using Jovial. Dave completed his graduate work (both a master’s degree and PhD in computer science) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. After Madison, he took a CS faculty position at Kansas State University.

Dave’s research areas include static analysis, software engineering (testing, reliability, and measurement), and autonomous robotics (vision and manipulations). His robotics teams have been successful at many Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) robotic competitions, and his graduate students have included nine PhD students and over 200 MS/MSE students. His Schuam’s outline of software engineering book has been translated into five languages, and his book Compiler construction (2nd ed.) was popular for many years.

Dave is proud of the high school programming contest that he, a graduate student, and another faculty member started almost three decades ago. About 200 high school students from all over Kansas spend the day solving six different programming problems.

He has been a reviewer for Computing Reviews since 1986.