Allen B. Tucker is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science at Bowdoin College, where he has taught since 1988. Prior to that, he held similar positions at Colgate (1983-88) and Georgetown (1971-83) Universities. Overall, he has served sixteen years as department chair and two years as Associate Dean of the Faculty. While at Colgate, he held the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Chair in Computer Science.
He earned a BA in mathematics from Wesleyan University and an MS and PhD in computer science from Northwestern University. He is the author or coauthor of many books and articles in the areas of programming languages, software design, natural language processing, and computer science education. He has given talks, panel discussions, and workshop presentations in these areas, and has served as a reviewer for various journals, NSF programs, and curriculum projects. He has also served as a consultant to several institutions in the areas of computer science curriculum, software design, programming languages, and natural language processing applications.
Professor Tucker co-chaired the ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Curriculum Task Force that developed Computing Curricula 1991, for which he received the ACM's Outstanding Contribution Award and shared the IEEE's Meritorious Service Award. He became a Fellow of the ACM in 1994, received the ACM SIGCSE award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education in February 2001, and was named an ACM Distinguished Lecturer in 2006. He is a co-author of the 1986 Liberal Arts Model Curriculum in Computer Science, Editor-in-Chief of the Handbook of Computer Science (CRC Press, 1999, 2004, and 2014), and co-author of the textbook Programming Languages (McGraw-Hill 2002, 2007). He has been member of the ACM, the IEEE Computer Society, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and the Liberal Arts Computer Science (LACS) Consortium.
In 2001, he was a Fulbright Lecturer at the Ternopil Academy of National Economy in Ukraine, in 2005 he was a visiting Erskine Lecturer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and in 2006 he was a visiting lecturer at ESIGELEC in France. He is currently an active member of the HFOSS software community.