Kenneth De Jong

Kenneth Alan De Jong (born 1944) is an American computer scientist and professor emeritus at George Mason University. He is one of the pioneers in evolutionary computation.

Education and career
De Jong was a student of John Henry Holland at the University of Michigan, where he completed a Ph.D. in 1975 with a dissertation on genetic algorithms. He became a faculty member at George Mason University in 1984.

He is the author of the textbook Evolutionary Computation: A Unified Approach (MIT Press, 2006), and was the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Evolutionary Computation, which published its first volume in 1993.

Recognition
De Jong was the 2005 recipient of the Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. He is also the recipient of a lifetime achievement award of the Evolutionary Programming Society. He was a distinguished speaker of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2014.