David Mount Receives Purdue Distinguished Science Alumni Award

David Mount, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, was named a recipient of the 2026 Distinguished Science Alumni Award from Purdue University. Mount earned his doctorate in computer science from Purdue in 1983 after completing both his undergraduate and graduate studies there.

The award honors alumni whose work and achievements have made a significant difference in their communities and fields.

“It’s a great honor to be recognized by my alma mater,” Mount said. “This award is given once each year, and to receive that recognition is very meaningful to me.”

Mount said his time at Purdue played a central role in shaping his academic path, from learning foundational programming concepts to conducting advanced research that led to his Ph.D.

“Purdue had a great influence on my career,” he said. “I learned everything from basic programming skills through my Ph.D., where I worked on advanced graph algorithms.”

As a graduate student, Mount's research focused on designing efficient algorithms for graph isomorphism, the problem of determining whether two network structures are fundamentally the same despite differences in representation. At the time, researchers anticipated the problem might be resolved within a few years, but it remains unresolved to this date.

“It turned out to be a much more difficult problem than we expected,” Mount said. “More than 40 years later, it is still an open problem.”

Following his doctoral work, Mount shifted his research focus under the guidance of his advisor, Christoph Hoffmann. He moved into computational geometry,  initially working on path planning and navigation, before concentrating on geometric approximation algorithms and data structures.

Mount joined UMD in 1984 and has since contributed to research in image processing, pattern recognition, information retrieval and computer graphics.

He has authored over 200 research publications and has served on the editorial boards of several journals, including TheoretiCS, Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications and the International Journal of Computational Geometry & Applications. He has also contributed to conference organization and program committees across the field.

In addition to his research, Mount has received multiple teaching awards, including the University of Maryland’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. He was also recognized with a teaching award at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he has served as a visiting professor.

Mount is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and has received ACM Recognition of Service Awards. He was also a co-recipient of the Symposium on Computational Geometry Test-of-Time Award in 2021.

—Story by Samuel Malede Zewdu, CS Communications