Contact info: The Department of Computer Science University of British Columbia 201-2366 Main Mall Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4 Phone: (604) 822-8175 Fax: (604) 822-5485 E-mail:

Anne Condon is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of British Columbia.

Anne joined the faculty at UBC in August 1999, having spent 12 years on the faculty of the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She received her Ph. D. (1987) from the University of Washington, Seattle and B. Sc. (1982) from University College, Cork, Ireland. Her Ph.D. thesis on game-like computational models won an ACM Distinguished Dissertation award. She also received an NSF National Young Investigator Award (1992) and an NSF Visiting Professorships for Women Award (1996) to support her work. Her research focuses on the power of randomness in computation. Through classification of randomized and nondeterministic complexity classes, her work has led to improved understanding of what types of intractable problems can be approximated and/or computed efficiently, notably PSPACE-hard problems and also problems in probabilistic planning.

In 1995, Anne initiated the Wisconsin DNA Computing Project. A goal of this research, which involves chemists, materials scientists, and computer scientists at U. Wisconsin is to store digital information in surface-bound DNA molecules in a scalable fashion and to perform logical operations on that information using enzymatic and chemical processes, thereby "computing" with DNA. She has also contributed to the Wisconsin Multifacet Project, where, as the theoretician of the group, her work focuses on reasoning about the correctness of cache coherence protocols.

Anne is co-chair of the Computing Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women ( CRA-W, 1999-2002) and previously was the coordinator of CRAW's Distributed Mentor Project .

Anne recently won the University College Cork's Distinguished Alumnus Achievement Award. The Alumnus Achievement Award is one of the highest honours UCC can bestow on an alumnus. The Award salutes the achievements of an outstanding alumnus whose professional achievements, life work and/or community involvement subscribes to the tradition of excellence for which UCC is celebrated.

Anne as a Computer Science Professor

Personal You:

1. Born in the year of the: Ox
2. Horoscope sign: Gemini
3. Last (or current) book read: The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich
4. Favourite movie(s)and reason why: The Secret of Inisrowan. It is based on a wonderful Irish myth about seals and the heroine is a girl named Fiona - my daughter's name.
5. Where will you be in 5 years? Right here working with this great Swift group that I have moved thousands of miles to join!
6. Name 3 things that people wouldn't ordinarily know about you:
   1. I enjoy the smell of cow barns (so do my kids... maybe this is genetic)
   2. The motto of my high school was "Do whatever He tells you"
   3. I love singing in choirs, most recently in Womonsong, Madison, WI and The Washingtonians, Seattle, WA

The Things We REALLY Want to Know About:

1. Which cartoon character do you most strongly identify with? Marge Simpson
2. If you could be a chemical (an element or a compound), what would you be? Water
3. What song title would best summarize your SWIFT experience so far? "What I had in mind" from "Das Barbeque!" by Jim Luigs and Scott Warrender
4. If you were stranded on a deserted tropical island, what 3 things would you most want to have with you?
   1. gardening tools
   2. lots of blank pages and pens
   3. a collection of sing-along CDs and a CD player
5. Why is the sky blue? Because one day a little boy who picked a basket of blue forget-me-nots was carried up to the heavens in a tornado and his basket overturned and covered the sky.
6. 
   
   
   Thanks to Celtic Web Art for the celtic art clip art.

next SWIFTer
previous SWIFTer
back to people
back to SWIFT home

Last Updated: September 9, 1999