Andrew Pitts works on the foundations of computer science through the application of logic and the mathematical theory of categories. His insight that properties of resources under permutations of their names can serve as the basis for a theory of structures involving locally scoped names has proved very fruitful, giving rise to a large body of work by many people, under the name 'nominal techniques'.
After a research fellowship at St John's College Cambridge and visiting positions in Montreal and Buffalo, he took up a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in mathematics at Sussex in the 1980s before moving to computer science at Cambridge.
He has been a Fellow of the ACM since 2012 and a Fellow of the British Computer Society and Charted IT Professional 2008-2023. Along with former PhD student, Jamie Gabbay, he received the 2019 Alonzo Church Award (ACM SIGLOG, EATCS, EACSL and KGS) and won (also with Gabbay) a 2019 Test-of-Time Award from the ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science. He served as Deputy Head of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory 2000–03 and 2005–10, and has served on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems and the Council of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.
Professional position
- Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Computer Science, Department of Computer Science and Technology, , University of Cambridge
