Franco P. Preparata is the An Wang Professor of Computer Science at Brown University since January 1991. Formerly he was a Professor of Electrical Engineering and of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Dr. Ing. degree from the University of Rome, Italy, in 1959; in 1969 he was awarded the Libera Docenza by the Italian University System. After years of industrial experience with Sperry Rand Univac and Selenia, a subsidiary of Raytheon, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois in 1965. Since then, he has also been a visiting professor at the University of Texas, Austin, the U.F.R.J., Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, the University of Pisa, Italy, I.N.R.I.A., Rocquencourt, France, the University of Saarbruecken,Germany, the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, France, Kyoto University, Japan, and the Academia Sinica, Taiwan.

He began his research activity in switching and coding theory. In this field he discovered a class of optimal burst-correcting codes(the Berlekamp-Preparata codes) and the first known class of optimum nonlinear codes known as Preparata codes. He also contributed to a classical model for fault diagnosis in digital systems, commonly referred to as the Preparata-Metze-Chien model. Gradually his interests evolved towards the design and analysis of computer algorithms, and he has carried out research in this field for the past eighteen years. He has made pioneering contributions to computational geometry, notably with his optimal convex hull and point-location algorithms, and the algorithmic use of geometric duality. He has also contributed to parallel computation and VLSI theory, notably through the cube-connected cycles architecture (with J. Vuillemin) and a number of significant results in the theory of wire routing. His most recent research interests include computational metrology, and his major focus is currently computational biology.

He has published nearly 200 papers in these fields and is the author (or co-author) of three textbooks: Introduction to Discrete Structures (with R.T. Yeh), Introduction to Computer Engineering, and Computational Geometry (with M.I. Shamos). He is on the Editorial Board of six of the premier journals in theoretical computer science.

Dr. Preparata is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the ACM, and he is listed in a large number of standard professional references. In 1993 he received the Darlington Prize of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. In 1994 he was a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Advancement of Science. In January 1997 he received the "Laurea honoris causa" in Information Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy.