Gruia-Catalin Roman, Ph.D., professor and chair of computer science and engineering, was installed as the Harold B. and Adelaide G. Welge Professor of Computer Science in a ceremony April 8 in Uncas A. Whitaker Hall for Biomedical Engineering.
The professorship was committed in 1988 by a University alumnus and his wife in the “hope that engineering education and research may be made more effective in present years, as well as years to come.”
Harold Brinton Welge earned a bachelor’s degree in architectural engineering in 1930 and a master’s degree in structural engineering in 1933 from the University.
He spent more than 26 years as a mechanical engineer and administrator with Procter & Gamble in St. Louis and Cincinnati before returning to work for the St. Louis Water Division. He retired in 1979 and died in 1990.
Adelaide Guinn Welge earned two degrees from the University of Pittsburgh, a bachelor’s in general science and a master’s in mathematics. She worked as a buyer for a major department store in Pittsburgh before marrying Harold in 1939.
Her career took her on business trips to Europe, where she became interested in fashion design and ornithology. She died in 1996.
In 1971, Roman, a native of Romania, was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and entered the first computer science freshman class at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned a bachelor’s degree (1973), a master’s degree (1974) and a doctorate (1976), all in computer science.
In 1975, at the age of 25, he became assistant professor of computer science at Washington University. He became professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science in 1997, just the third person to head the department.
In recent years, he has led his computer science colleagues through dramatic transformations.
In just five years, the faculty size reached an all-time high of 25. Fifteen faculty members were hired as part of a successful recruiting effort, and three transferred into the department as a result of a restructuring that consolidated the computer engineering and computer science programs into a single department, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
Roman’s research spans a broad range of computer science subfields, including mobile computing, formal design methods, visualization, requirements and design methodologies for distributed systems, interactive high-speed computer vision algorithms, formal languages, biomedical simulation, computer graphics and distributed databases.
His international reputation played a critical role in securing St. Louis as the host city for the 2005 International Conference on Software Engineering, for which he will serve as general chair.
All his work has been the result of intensive collaborations with students and colleagues. His initial efforts were marked by contributions to areas that were in their formative stage — for example, concurrency coordination in distributed databases, real-time image processing and pipelined graphic processing.
Later work was motivated by the desire to change the way software developers think about the systems they construct and to facilitate both rapid and dependable engineering of programs and tools for software development.
As Roman’s interests gradually shifted toward the study of mobile computing, he established the Mobile Computing Laboratory and started work on a new generation of models and software systems that have enhanced the department’s profile worldwide.
Roman has published more than 120 technical papers; graduated 12 doctoral students — with the majority pursuing their own academic careers — and has been very active professionally, serving various professional societies in a number of capacities.
“The School of Engineering & Applied Science highly values the integrity, energy and vision that Catalin Roman brings to computer science and engineering,” said Christopher I. Byrnes, Ph.D., dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science and the Edward H. and Florence G. Skinner Professor of Systems Science and Mathematics. “Catalin runs an ambitious agenda that is getting more and more recognition because of the world-class research being performed in his department.
“He’s very well-known not only for his research areas, most recently mobile computing, and for his skills as an administrator, but also for the many collaborations he’s participated in over his nearly 30 years at Washington University.”
Roman is a member of Tau Beta Pi, the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society.
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