New Undergraduate Scholarship Endowed

The David Mix Barrington Scholarship in Computer Science has been established in the College of Information and Computer Sciences. This endowed scholarship will provide annual support to a rising senior who is pursuing a second major in addition to a computer science major. Recipients will be excellent students, with a GPA of >3.0, and have demonstrated financial need.

Donor Quentin Clark is an undergraduate alumnus of UMass Amherst (BS '94) originally from Sherborn, MA. He completed most of the computer science undergraduate curriculum in addition to his physics major, and benefited from his academic work in both fields. Now Chief Business Officer at SAP after several leadership roles at Microsoft Corporation, Clark seeks to support talented students who will bring the perspectives and tools of multiple disciplines to his or her work. 

As an undergraduate, Clark took a class with Professor David Mix Barrington, which he says was influential: "His class was instrumental in my learning and development in the field, and his inspiration was a key part of my journey. The challenge, the drive to find better ways, the discipline around correctness - all a core part of how I approached so many interesting software challenges over my career."

Barrington, whom this scholarship honors, has been on the UMass Amherst Computer Science faculty since 1986. His research is in complexity theory, examining the resources needed by various abstract computing devices, both sequential and parallel, to solve various mathematical problems. In particular, Barrington has discovered new relationships between combinatorial complexity (circuits and branching programs), the theory of finite automata, and definability by first-order logic.

The David Mix Barrington Scholarship in Computer Science is the college's fourth endowed scholarship specifically supporting undergraduate students.