Jean-Louis Lassez, professor and chair of Coastal Carolina University’s Department of Computer Science, was recently honored by the Association for Logic Programming, an international organization of computer scientists, professors and researchers, for producing “the Most Influential Paper in 20 Years.”

The award, presented at an international conference in St. Malo, France (Lassez’s hometown), recognizes his pioneering achievement in developing a new computer programming language called constraint logic programming. The paper that won the award was highly influential in the creation of a new field of research that uses special computer software to solve highly complex mathematical problems.

Lassez wrote the paper in 1987 while serving as a senior scientist at the IBM Research Center in New York. The paper was written in collaboration with Joxan Jaffar, now dean of the School of Informational Sciences at the National University of Singapore.

Lassez, who joined the Coastal faculty in 2001, now works in the field of bioinformatics, a relatively new discipline devoted to analyzing highly complex mathematical data generated though DNA research. A native of Bordeaux, France, Lassez earned degrees in mathematics and computer science from the University of Paris and a Ph.D. from Purdue University. He has taught at Purdue, the University of Melbourne (Australia), and was an adjunct professor at New York University and Brown University during his tenure at the IBM Research Center. Lassez was chair of the Department of Computer Science at the New Mexico Institute of Technology and a senior research scientist at Integrated Genomics.

In December 2004, the 9th Asian Computer Science Conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand, will be dedicated to Lassez in honor of his significant achievements in computer science research. Jonathan Bernick, assistant professor of computer science at Coastal, is an invited speaker at the conference.