Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., is Kenan Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A native of North Carolina, he studied physics at Duke University and did his Ph.D. work at Harvard under Howard Aiken.

At IBM in Poughkeepsie NY he was an architect of the IBM Stretch and Harvest computers. He was Corporate Project Manager for the System/360, including development of the System/360 computer family hardware, and the Operating System/360 software. The first 360 model and key components of the operating system were developed in IBM’s laboratory at Hursley, Hants.

He founded the UNC Department of Computer Science in 1964 and chaired it for 20 years. His research there has been in computer architecture, software engineering, interactive 3-D computer graphics ("virtual environments"), and the design process for complex system. His best-known books are The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, (1975, 1995), Computer Architecture: Concepts and Evolution (with G.A. Blaauw, 1997), and The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist (2010).

Prof. Brooks has received the National Medal of Technology, the ACM Turing Award, the Bower Award and Prize of the Franklin Institute, the John von Neumann Medal of the IEEE, the Allen Newell and Distinguished Service awards of the ACM, and the Eckert-Mauchly Award of the IEEE and the ACM. He is a member of the the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Engineering and a Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Prof. Brooks has spent three sabbatical stays at Cambridge and one at University College London. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society and a Foreign Member of the Royal Academy of Engineering.