Gerard Holzmann

Gerard J. Holzmann
Gerard J. Holzmann 2006
Born	1951 (1951) Amsterdam, Netherlands
Nationality	American
Fields	Model Checking
Institutions	Bell Labs
Alma mater	Delft University of Technology
Doctoral advisor	Willem van der Poel and J.L. de Kroes
Known for	Developing the SPIN model checker
Notable awards	Paris Kanellakis Award (2005)

Gerard J. Holzmann (born 1951) is a Dutch-born American computer scientist and researcher at Bell Labs and NASA, best known as the developer of the SPIN model checker.

Holzmann was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands and received an Engineer's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Delft University of Technology in 1976. He subsequently also received his PhD degree from Delft University in 1979 under W.L. van der Poel and J.L. de Kroes with a thesis entitled Coordination problems in multiprocessing systems. After receiving a Fulbright Scholar he was post-graduate student at the University of Southern California for another year, where he worked with Per Brinch Hansen.

In 1980 he started at Bell Labs in Murray Hill for a year. Back in the Netherlands he was Assistant Professor at the Delft University of Technology for two years. In 1983 he returned to Bell Labs where he worked in the Computing Science Research Center (the former Unix research group). In 2003 he jointed NASA, where he leads the NASA JPL Laboratory for Reliable Software in Pasadena, California and is a JPL fellow.

In 1981 Holzmann was awarded the Prof. Bahler Prize by the , the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award in 2005, and the NASA Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal in October 2012. Holzmann was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2005. In 2011 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.