Henry DeYoung Featured in the Post-Gazette

News

Today’s Sunday paper (September 28, 2008 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) has a great feature article on Henry DeYoung and his brother, Andrew. The article, which appears on the front page, is the first of a planned series.

I don’t want to embarrass Henry too much, but in light of the glowing newspaper article, I think it is OK to say the he is, in a word, brilliant. I understand that his brother is, too. Despite having significant physical limitations due to spinal muscular atrophy, Henry graduated at the top of his class in our undergraduate computer science program, completed a great senior research project with Frank Pfenning, won an NSF graduate fellowship, was given honorable mention by the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award competition and, finally, was easily admitted to our Ph.D. program in computer science.

Henry has great potential to do very important computer science research. But he has already had impact in other ways, for example by providing a great motivator for our program to improve the accessibility of its lectures, social programs, and projects. Some of our very best students have been enriched by interacting with Henry, not only socially but by being research collaborators and scribes for his exams and coding assignments.

Undoubtedly Henry will face enormous challenges during the next few years as he makes his way through our Ph.D. program, some perhaps exacerbated by his physical limitations. Probably he’ll experience setbacks just like all graduate students do from time to time. But I am very optimistic that Henry DeYoung will end up making an important contribution to the field, and along the way continue to make our program better, too.

Peter Lee @ September 28, 2008