Professor Victor Raskin has been named the Distinguished Professor of English and Linguistics by the Purdue University board of trustees.

Raskin, a faculty member in the Department of English at Purdue since 1978, performs research in natural language processing, ontology, computational semantics, world and lexical knowledge acquisition, and humor. His key research areas are security awareness, education, training cryptology and rights management.

At CERIAS, Raskin serves as Associate Director for Graduate Education. He has served on the CERIAS Internal Advisory Board since its inception. Together with Professor Mikhail Atallah, Raskin pioneered research on the interface of natural language processing and information security.

He founded the Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics and the Natural Language Processing Laboratory at Purdue and was co-developer of a groundbreaking ontological semantic approach to natural language processing. He has served as principal investigator for several natural language processing projects in Russia, Israel and the United States.

Raskin has authored 16 books and close to 200 articles on natural language processing, linguistic and semantic theory, philosophy of language and science, and various applications of linguistics and computational linguistics to adjacent areas, including information security.

A professor of English and linguistics, he also is editor-at-large of HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research and a charter member and internal advisory board member for Purdue’s Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security.

Raskin earned bachelor’s degrees in structural and computational linguistics from Moscow State University in the Soviet Union. He also received master’s and doctoral degrees from Moscow State. He taught at Moscow State, Tel Aviv University in Israel, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Michigan before arriving at Purdue.

• Purdue trustees honor 6 faculty members