Association of Research Libraries (ARL®)

Michael Lesk is a professor in the Library and Information Science Department, SCILS (School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies), Rutgers University. In the 1960s he worked for the SMART project, wrote much of their retrieval code and did many of the retrieval experiments, as well as obtaining a PhD in Chemical Physics. In the 1970s he worked in the group that built Unix and wrote Unix tools for word processing (tbl, refer), compiling (lex), and networking (uucp).

During the 1980s, Dr. Lesk worked on specific information systems applications, mostly with geography (a system for driving directions) and dictionaries (a system for disambiguating words in context), as well as running a research group at Bellcore. More recently, he worked on a large chemical information system, the CORE project, with Cornell, OCLC, ACS and CAS. From 1998-2002 he headed the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. Professor Lesk received the "Flame'' award for lifetime achievement from Usenix in 1994 and is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).