Joseph Sifakis

Who is Joseph Sifakis?

Joseph Sifakis is a Greek-born French computer scientist, laureate of the 2007 Turing Award, along with Edmund M. Clarke and E. Allen Emerson, for his work on model checking.

He was born in Heraklion, Crete in 1946 and studied Electrical Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens and Computer Science at the University of Grenoble under a French scholarship. He received a doctorate in 1974 from the University of Grenoble, where he also received a state doctorate in 1979.

He was awarded in 2009 a Dr. h.c. from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, where he has been appointed Full Professor in 2011.

Sifakis lives in France, whose citizenship he took in 1976 and works for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique at the VERIMAG laboratory near Grenoble, of which he is a founder.

He is also coordinator of Artist2, the European Network of Excellence for research on Embedded Systems.

He is a grand officer of France's national order of merit and commander in France's Legion of Honour.