Douglas C. Schmidt

Douglas C. Schmidt (born July 18, 1962) is a computer scientist and author in the fields of object-oriented programming, reactive programming, distributed computing, design patterns and generative AI. He is the inaugural Dean of the School of Computing, Data Sciences & Physics at William & Mary.

Biography In August 1994 he joined the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis. From August 1999 to December 2002 he was associate professor with tenure at the University of California, Irvine. During much of this time he worked for DARPA managing US federal funded research programs. In 2003 he became professor of computer Science at Vanderbilt University, and associate chair of computer science and engineering in December 2004. In August 2010 he became a deputy director, research, and chief technology officer at Software Engineering Institute. In April 2013 he became a director at Real-Time Innovations. In January 2025 he became the inaugural Dean of the School of Computing, Data Sciences & Physics at William & Mary.

He led teams that developed an Adaptive Communication Environment (ACE), The ACE ORB (TAO), a component-integrated ACE ORB (CIAO), and an implementation of the Deployment and Configuration standard built on top of TAO (DAnCE). "ORB" refers to a key piece of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture. They were made available as open-source software.

On February 8, 2024, Schmidt was approved by the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee to become the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation for the Department of Defense. He was confirmed by the full Senate on February 29, 2024.

Publications

Articles Douglas C. Schmidt published articles in C++ Report and C/C++ Users Journal. He edited "Object Interconnections" column in C/C++ Users Journal, and "Patterns++" column in C++ Report.

Books