PHILADELPHIA Fernando C.N. Pereira, Ph.D., has been named Andrew and Debra Rachleff Professor and chair of the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, effective July 1, 2001.

Pereira comes to Penn from the technology sector. Currently distinguished research scientist at the Pittsburgh office of WhizBang! Labs a Web information mining company that has built the Internet's largest commercial online recruiting site, FlipDog.com Pereira also spent 11 years as a researcher at Bell Laboratories and AT&T Labs, including six years as head of AT&T machine learning and information retrieval research department.

Pereira holds degrees from the University of Lisbon and the University of Edinburgh, which awarded him a Ph.D. in 1982. An internationally recognized researcher in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence with particular focus on machine learning techniques in language and speech recognition, he has taught at Stanford University, the University of California at Santa Cruz, Lisbon, and Penn. A fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Pereira has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Logic Programming, Studies in Logic, Language, and Information, the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and the MIT Press series on logic programming.

"Fernando Pereira is a deep scholar who also has an innate understanding of the practical applications of research," said Eduardo D. Glandt, Ph.D., dean of Penn School of Engineering and Applied Science. "This powerful combination of talents has allowed him to work successfully across the interface between the academic and the corporate worlds. His knowledge of the two cultures will be a precious asset to our school."

Attracting Pereira to Penn were the university strength in his own field and the opportunities a highly interdisciplinary research university affords for study of the increasingly complex relationships between digital information processing and the natural and social worlds.

"The great successes of computing and communications technologies in the last few years are not a sign that all the main fundamental questions of computer science have been solved," Pereira said. "On the contrary, those successes are creating extraordinary new challenges in science, engineering, education and policy. Universities are in the best position to address those new questions. Their great permeability to society through the constant flow of students, postdoctoral researchers, research grants and faculty involvement in outside activities allows them to learn firsthand of the ideas, concerns and needs of all sectors of society."

As head of the computer and information science department at Penn, Pereira priorities will include keeping undergraduate education abreast of rapid changes in technology and society; maintaining a strong, bold research program; and further developing links with other academic departments in the sciences and humanities.

The endowed chair Pereira will assume is named for Andrew and Debra Rachleff of Portola Valley, Calif. Andrew Rachleff, a 1980 graduate of the Wharton School and member of the Board of Overseers of Penn School of Engineering and Applied Science, is co-founder and general partner of Benchmark Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm dedicated to helping talented entrepreneurs build technology companies. He also serves on the boards of CacheFlow, Charitable Way, Equinix, CoreExpress, Gemini Networks, Loudcloud, Mahi Networks, NorthPoint Communications and Rasa Foundries.