Leonard Adleman serves as the Henry Salvatori Chair in Computer Science and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering. He also holds an appointment as Professor of Molecular Biology by courtesy. Adleman earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968. Following a brief period as a computer programmer at the Bank of America, he returned to Berkeley and obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1976, with a thesis titled "Number Theoretic Aspects of Computational Complexity" under the supervision of Manuel Blum. His academic career commenced at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he served as an instructor in 1976, assistant professor in 1977, and associate professor from 1979 to 1980. In 1980, Adleman joined USC as a tenured associate professor, advancing to full professor in 1983, Henry Salvatori Professor in 1985, and Distinguished Professor in 2000.

Adleman's research interests encompass algorithms, computational complexity, computer viruses, cryptography, DNA computing, immunology, molecular biology, number theory, quantum computing, and evolution. He is one of the creators of the RSA public-key cryptosystem, introduced in the seminal 1978 paper "A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems," co-authored with Ronald Rivest and Adi Shamir, which revolutionized data encryption and underpins much of modern internet security. Adleman coined the term "computer virus" based on work by his student Fred Cohen in 1983 and pioneered the field of DNA computing by demonstrating in 1994 that DNA strands could solve an instance of the NP-complete Hamiltonian Path problem, as published in "Molecular Computation of Solutions to Combinatorial Problems." Additional contributions include deterministic and randomized primality testing algorithms developed with collaborators such as Ming-Deh Huang and Carl Pomerance. His honors include the 2002 ACM A.M. Turing Award shared with Rivest and Shamir, the 1996 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, the 2000 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, election to the National Academy of Engineering in 1996, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006, and the National Academy of Sciences in 2007. Adleman also received the 1995 University of California, Berkeley Department of Computer Science and Engineering Distinguished Alumnus Award and the 1978 IEEE Group on Information Theory Best Paper Award.

Professional Email: adleman@usc.edu