Professor Glynn Winskel FRS

Glynn Winskel has changed how computer scientists view, formalise, and analyse computation. His early work on event structures is used widely, for instance, in verifying cryptographic protocols and the behaviour of relaxed memory in chip design. He discovered a fundamental categorical foundation underlying models of interactive computation which has been adopted extensively by otherwise separate research communities. More recently, he has uncovered a previously elusive, unifying notion of strategy for distributed games; unthinkable without his categorical foundation. Distributed games and strategies provide a broad basis for the semantics of computation, bridging across mathematical proof and probabilistic and quantum computation. Almost incidentally, they yield methods to program winning and optimal strategies in a form of structural game theory.


He became Professor at Strathclyde in 2020 and Chief Scientist at Huawei (2021- 2024) on retiring from Cambridge as Professor of Computer Science.  His return to Cambridge in 2000 followed 12 years as Professor at Aarhus University where he established the world-famous research centre BRICS (Basic Research in Computer Science). He is a Member of Academia Europaea and Adjunct Professor at Copenhagen University.

Professional position

  • Professor of Computer and Information Science, Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde

Subject groups

  • Computer Sciences

    Programming languages and verification

  • Mathematics

    Pure mathematics