Welcome to Wolfgang Banzhaf's Homepage
Picture taken at European Parliament on occasion of the "Day of Europe, 2010" ©Pia Banzhaf
Brief Professional Biography
Wolfgang Banzhaf is Honorary Research Professor (ret.) in the Department of
Computer Science of
Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Previously he was a professor there and served as head of department there from 2003 to 2009
and again from 2012 to 2016. In 2016 he was appointed the John R. Koza Endowed Chair in Genetic Programming
at Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA, and holds this position since then.
Prof. Banzhaf received a "Diplom in Physik" degree in
Physics (equivalent to a M.Sc.)
from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich.
He received his
Dr.rer.nat (PhD) from the Department of Physics
of the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe, now
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
Prof. Banzhaf was postdoctoral research associate at the
1. Institute of Theoretical Physics of
the University of Stuttgart, Visiting and Senior Researcher at the Central
Research Lab, now the
Advanced Technology R&D Center of Mitsubishi Electric Corporation in Japan and at
Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs
(MERL) in Cambridge, MA, USA. From 1993 to 2003 he was Associate Professor for Applied Computer Science
in the Department of Computer Science of the
Technical University of Dortmund.
Prof. Banzhaf's research interests are in the field of bio-inspired computing,
notably evolutionary computation and complex adaptive systems. Studies of self-organization
and the field of Artificial Life are also of very much interest to him. Recently he has become more
involved with network research as it applies to natural and man-made systems.
Prof. Banzhaf has served as a member of the Executive Board of the International Society for Artificial Life
(ISAL), in charge of membership administration, from 2019-2024. He had served on that board
previously from 2009 to 2015. He was treasurer and member of the Executive Board of SPECIES, the society
for the promotion of Evolutionary Computation in Europe and Surroundings from 2015 to 2022. He was a member of the Executive Committee of
ACM-SIGEVO, the Special Interest Group for Evolutionary Computation of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM)
where he has served as Chair of that Executive Committee from 2011-2015 after having served as SIGEVO's treasurer 2005-2011 and its
predecessor, ISGEC from 1999-2005. Since 2021 he is a member of the SIGEVO Advisory Board.
He has also served on the board of a private companies and technology transfer institutes.
He has founded the scholarly journal "Genetic Programming and
Evolvable Machines", published quarterly
by Springer and is editorial board member of a number of journals:
ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization,
Artificial Life,
Computational Intelligence,
IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation,
Intl. J. of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems,
PeerJ Computer Science,
Theoretical Computer Science - C (TCS-C).
He is lead author of the first textbook on Genetic Programming (see below), the first monograph on
Artificial Chemistries, and also has co-founded the European Conference series on Genetic Programming. Currently, he is serving as series editor of the Springer-Nature Series on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation which publishes recent interesting work in the area of computational approaches to evolution and artificial life.
Prof. Banzhaf is a Senior Fellow of the former International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary
Computation (ISGEC) and has received the ACM SIGEVO Outstanding Contribution Award in 2023. In 2007 he had already won
the
EvoStar Award for Outstanding Achievements in Evolutionary
Computation in Europe. In 2010 he has been appointed
University Research Professor at Memorial University
for sustained contributions to research, the highest honour Memorial University bestows on an academic. He was a
Honorary Research Professor at Memorial University from 2018 to 2023.
In 2022 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Society for Artficial Life (ISAL).
Contact
Department of Computer Science
Memorial University of Newfoundland
St. John's, NL, A1B 3X5
CANADA
Tel: +1 (709) 864-
Fax: +1 (709) 864-
Email (blanks against robots): Mylastname at cs. mun. ca
SJ Carew Building
Details
Links
- You can find me on Google Scholar here and on Microsoft Academic Search here.
- Here is my standing within the institution. According to Google and according to Microsoft.
- You can find me on Prof. Palsberg's list of the 600 most highly cited computer scientists (using the h-index on Google Scholar) world-wide.
- A newer development is the publication of the Handbook of Evolutionary Machine Learning by Springer in 2024. This is a collected volume of the newest in a burgeoning field.
- I co-authored first book on Artificial Chemistries Artificial Chemistries, with L. Yamamoto, published by MIT Press in 2015. See also at Amazon
Artificial Chemistries
- More on Linear Genetic Programming you can find in our book from 2007:
Linear Genetic Programming,
a monograph by Brameier and Banzhaf, published by Springer.
See also at Amazon: Linear Genetic Programming (Genetic and Evolutionary Computation)
- Here is our classic book (1998) :
Genetic Programming - An Introduction,
a textbook by Banzhaf, Nordin, Keller and Francone, published originally by Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco, which became part of
Acadmic Press, Reading, which itself later became part of Elsevier Science.
See also at Amazon: Genetic Programming: An Introduction (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial Intelligence)
.
- I am regularly involved in conferences and workshops.
Among these events are:
-
Libraries and Literature
Department of Computer
Science
Faculty of Science
Memorial University of Newfoundland
St. John's Airport
Wolfgang Banzhaf Last updated: June 23, 2025