Panagiotis (Takis) Metaxas is Associate Professor of the Computer Science department at Wellesley College. He has been with the Wellesley faculty since 1992, teaching and designing courses in Computer Science, advising students and conducting research in parallel computing, image processing and multimedia. His work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and other national and regional funding agencies.

Professor Metaxas received a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Athens, Greece, in 1984 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Dartmouth College. He taught at Dartmouth (1991-92) where he was also adjunct faculty of the Ph.D. program (1992-95), and he has been a visiting scholar at the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1995-96) and at the Department for Computer Science at the University of Sydney, Australia. He has received an Apgar Award for Teaching Excellence (1996-97) and a Brachman Hoffman Fellowship (1996-97). He is a member of the Association for Computer Machinery, IEEE Computer Society and ACM's Electronic Publication Board for SIGACT. Outside Academia, he has worked as a consultant for several high-tech companies and worked as the Chief Technology Officer of OPTAx Systems, Inc., a biotech company specializing in computerized tests for mental disorders.

His research interests and publications include the design and analysis of sequential and parallel algorithms, solutions to fundamental graph-theoretical problems such as connected components and minimum spanning trees, image processing and multimedia applications design and development. He also holds a U.S. patent on parallel dithering (halftoning) techniques that can lead to faster printers and large screen monitors.

Being an educator, Professor Metaxas is also interested in Computing education and has developed interdisciplinary courses on parallel computing and on multimedia. He has published several interactive multimedia CD-ROMs containing interactive multimedia proceedings of a research conference, multimedia lectures for education on parallel computing and student multimedia projects. He has also created "Electric Thoreau," an electronic book-of-the-future based on the ideas of the artist Dennis Downey.

Profile last updated: 9/02

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Last Modified: June 30, 2003