W. Bruce Croft is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, which he joined in 1979. In 1992, he founded the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR), which combines basic research with technology transfer to a variety of government and industry partners. Dr. Croft was Chair of the department from 2001-2007.

He received the B.Sc.(Honors) degree in 1973, and an M.Sc. in Computer Science in 1974 from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His Ph.D. in Computer Science was from the University of Cambridge, England in 1979.

His research interests are in many areas of information retrieval, including retrieval models, representation, Web search, query processing, cross-lingual retrieval, and search architectures. He has published more than 200 articles on these and other subjects, has served on numerous program committees, and has been involved in the organization of many workshops and conferences.

Dr. Croft was a member of the National Research Council Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, 2000-2003, and Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 1995-2002. Dr. Croft was elected a Fellow of ACM in 1997, received the Research Award from the American Society for Information Science and Technology in 2000, and received the Gerard Salton Award from the ACM Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (SIGIR) in 2003.