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 is currently a member of the Executive Board of the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL), in charge of membership administration. He 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: Artificial Life, Applied Soft Computing, Computational Intelligence, Theoretical Computer Science - C (TCS-C), Intl. J. of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems, ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization, and the open-access journal PeerJ Computer Science. 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.

Prof. Banzhaf is a Senior Fellow of the former International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (ISGEC) and has received 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 is now Honorary Research Professor (ret.) at Memorial. 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


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Department of Computer Science     Faculty of Science     Memorial University of Newfoundland     St. John's Airport


Wolfgang Banzhaf Last updated: August 18, 2022



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