Distinguished Professor Earns Emeritus Title
This spring, retired faculty leaders at The University of Texas at Dallas were awarded honorary emeritus titles for their dedicated service and long-lasting influence on the University.
Dr. Paul Fishwick joined 90 current retired UT Dallas presidents, deans and professors who have received this lifetime academic appointment. Emeritus appointments recognize faculty members who have served with particular distinction and honor and who have established a bond with the institution.
“UT Dallas has been most fortunate to employ many remarkable faculty members, as the long list of emeritus appointments attests,” said Dr. Inga H. Musselman, vice president for academic affairs, provost and the Cecil H. Green Distinguished Chair of Academic Leadership. “Not only are they talented, but they’re versatile, too. Dr. Fishwick and others showed that with their accomplishments.”
Dr. Paul Fishwick, who retired on Jan. 1, 2023, held dual appointments in the School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology (as it was known at the time), and in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science as a professor of computer science. He also led the Creative Automata Lab, designed to bring human elements to the fields of science, technology, engineering and math.
Fishwick pioneered the area of aesthetic computing, bringing together elements of art, modeling, simulation and engineering, with the goal of exploring new representational approaches. He built models that showed what abstract concepts and complex equations physically represent. These representations of mathematical formulas and computer software were intended to improve understanding of how abstract artifacts work.
Early in his career, Fishwick worked as a programmer analyst for Newport News Shipbuilding. He also worked at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia as a systems analyst. Later, he was director of the University of Florida’s digital arts and sciences programs.
When he joined the UT Dallas faculty in 2013, he was appointed to the Arts, Humanities, and Technology Distinguished University Chair.
A version of this article appeared in News Center.