Dexter Campbell Kozen is an American theoretical computer scientist. He is Joseph Newton Pew, Jr. Professor in Engineering at Cornell University. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1974 and his PhD in computer science in 1977 from Cornell University, where he was advised by Juris Hartmanis.
He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a Guggenheim Fellow, and has received an Outstanding Innovation Award from IBM Corporation. He has also been named Faculty of the Year by the Association of Computer Science Undergraduates at Cornell.
Dexter Kozen was one of the first professors to receive the honor of a professorship at The Radboud Excellence Initiative at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
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 μ-calculus most used today. Moreover, he has written several textbooks on the theory of computation, automata theory, dynamic logic, and algorithms.
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 and plays for the Cortland Homer Thundering Herd rugby team.