Maurice Herlihy, a computer science professor at Brown University, has been named the 2013 recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s prestigious W. Wallace McDowell Award for his contributions to multiprocessor computation.

Herlihy, whose research focuses on practical and theoretical aspects of concurrent and distributed computing, was recognized for his “fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of multi-processor computation.” His early work on wait-free synchronization showed that different synchronization operations have different computational power, but that any operation that can solve consensus is universal.

The McDowell Award is given to individuals for outstanding recent theoretical, design, educational, practical, or ...