Jim Whitehead

Who is Jim Whitehead?

E. James Whitehead is Professor and Chair of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States. He received a BS in Electrical Engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1989, and a PhD in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine, in 2000.

Previously, he performed hard, real-time firmware development as a software engineer for Raytheon, 1989–1992. From 1996–2004, Whitehead created and led the Internet Engineering Task Force working group on Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning, and is considered the "father" of the WebDAV protocol. He is author on over 50 peer-reviewed articles on software engineering and hypertext systems, and seven Internet standards documents.

Whitehead led the creation of the BS Computer Science: Computer Game Design degree program at UC Santa Cruz, the first game oriented degree program within the University of California system. He is also working with the Expressive Intelligence Studio as an advisor.

He is the president of the Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games, the organization that sponsors the Foundations of Digital Games conference series.