Gerard J. Holzmann

Gerard J. Holzmann (born 1951) is a Dutch-American computer scientist best known as the developer of the SPIN model checker, a tool for verifying the correctness of concurrent software that has been freely available since 1991. He worked at Bell Labs from 1980 to 1981 and again from 1983 to 2003 in the Computing Science Research Center, where he developed SPIN, then joined NASA in 2003 to lead the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Laboratory for Reliable Software in Pasadena, California, where he holds the status of JPL fellow. He earned an engineer's degree in electrical engineering from Delft University of Technology in 1976 and a PhD from the same institution in 1979 under Willem van der Poel. His honors include the ACM Software System Award in 2001, the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award in 2005, election to the National Academy of Engineering in 2005, ACM Fellow in 2011, and a NASA Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal in 2012.