Fortnow received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathmatics at MIT in 1989 under
the supervision of Michael Sipser. After two stints at the University
of Chicago (spending four years at the NEC Research Institute
in-between), Fortnow started as a Professor in the Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science Department at Northwestern University
in January of 2008. Fortnow also has a courtesy appointment at the
Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences department at the Kellogg
Graduate School of Management and an adjunct professorship at the
Toyota Technological Institute–Chicago.
Fortnow's research spans computational complexity and its
applications. His major results on interactive proof systems and
time-space lower bounds for satsifability have led to his election as
a 2007 ACM Fellow. In addition he was an NSF Presidential Faculty
Fellow from 1992-1998 and a Fulbright Scholar to the Netherlands in
1996-97 where he spent a productive sabbatical year at CWI and the
University of Amsterdam.
