Dexter Kozen

Dexter Campbell Kozen (born December 20, 1951) is an American theoretical computer scientist. He is Professor Emeritus and Joseph Newton Pew, Jr. Professor in Engineering at Cornell University.

Career Kozen received his BA in mathematics from Dartmouth College in 1974 and his PhD in computer science in 1977 from Cornell University, where he was advised by Juris Hartmanis on the thesis, Complexity of Finitely Presented Algebras.

He is known for his work at the intersection of logic and complexity. He is one of the fathers of dynamic logic and developed the version of the modal μ-calculus most used today. His work on Kleene algebra with tests automata theory, dynamic logic,

Kozen was a guitarist, singer, and songwriter in the band "Harmful if Swallowed". He also holds the position of faculty advisor for Cornell's rugby football club.

Awards and honors John G. Kemeny Prize in Computing, Dartmouth College (1974) Outstanding Innovation Award, IBM Corporation (1991) Stephen and Margery Russell Distinguished Teaching Award, College of Arts and Sciences, Cornell (2003) Fellow, AAAS (2008) 2001 LICS Test-of-Time Award for the paper "A completeness theorem for Kleene algebras and the algebra of regular events" (2011) Faculty of the Year, ACSU (Association of Computer Science Undergraduates at Cornell) (2014) Fellow, EATCS (2015) EATCS Distinguished Achievements Award (2016) McDowell Award, for groundbreaking contributions to topics ranging from computational complexity to the analysis of algebraic computations to logics of programs and verification (2016) Weiss Presidential Fellow (2018) POPL Distinguished Paper Award for the paper "Guarded Kleene algebra with tests: verification of uninterpreted programs in nearly linear time" (2020) Alonzo Church Award, for his fundamental work on developing the theory and applications of Kleene Algebra with Tests, an equational system for reasoning about iterative programs, published in the paper "Kleene algebra with tests" (2022) OOPSLA Distinguished Paper Award for the paper "Formal abstractions for packet scheduling" (2023)