Paris Kanellakis

Paris Christos Kanellakis (; December 3, 1953 – December 20, 1995) was a Greek American computer scientist.

Life and academic path

Kanellakis was born on December 3, 1953, in Athens as the only child of General Eleftherios and Mrs. Argyroula Kanellakis.

alt=Photo of blue book on white library table, with more books on shelves in the background. A copy of Kanellakis's Ph.D. thesis in a library at MIT.

In 1976, he received a diploma in electrical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, with a thesis supervised by Emmanuel Protonotarios. He continued his studies at the graduate level in electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his M.Sc. degree in 1978. His thesis Algorithms for a scheduling application of the Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem was supervised by Ron Rivest and Michael Athans, while Christos Papadimitriou (then professor at Harvard) was also involved. He then continued working for his Ph.D. with Papadimitriou (who was then also at MIT) as advisor. He submitted his thesis The complexity of concurrency control for distributed databases in September 1981. He was awarded the doctorate degree in February 1982.

In 1981, he joined the Computer Science Department at Brown University as assistant professor. He obtained tenure as associate professor in 1986, and became full professor in 1990. He interrupted his stay at Brown in 1984 for a junior sabbatical as visiting assistant professor at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, working with Nancy Lynch, and in 1988 for a year at INRIA on special assignment leave, working with Serge Abiteboul. Between 1982 and 1991, he paid several short visits to the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.

His awards include an IBM Faculty Development Award (1985) and a Sloan Research Fellowship in mathematics (1987–1989). During 1989–90, he was IBM Associate Professor of Computer Science.

He was born a Greek citizen, and obtained U.S. citizenship in 1988.

Kanellakis died on December 20, 1995, together with his wife, Maria Teresa Otoya, and their two children, Alexandra and Stephanos, in the crash of American Airlines Flight 965 while en route to an annual holiday reunion with his wife's family.