Tadao Murata received the B.S. degree in Electronics from Tokai Univ., Tokyo, in 1962, the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 1964 and 1966, respectively. He is presently a UIC Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he initially joined in 1966. During occasional leaves of absence from the University of Illinois, he taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Tokai University, Tokyo, Japan, and Osaka University (as Endowed Hitachi-Chair Professor for 1993-94), Toyonaka, Japan. Also, he was invited to visit Dr. C. A. Petri's Institute at GMD, mbH, Germany, and several research institutes and universities in Europe.
In 1990, he received a distinguished faculty (senior university scholar) award from the President of the University of Illinois. He is the recipient of the 1991 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Award. He was named Golden Core Charter Member of the IEEE Computer Society on the occasion of the Society's 50th anniversary in 1996. In 1998, he received a Faculty Research Award from the UIC College of Engineering. In 2000, he was chosen as the first recipient of the Carl Adam Petri Distinguished Technical Achievement Award by the Society for Design & Process Science (SDPS). In 2002, he received the honorific title of "UIC Distinguished Professor." UIC.CS.News
His current research interests include Petri net theory and its applications, especially to software engineering, soft computing, and the modeling and analysis of concurrent and/or distributed systems, logic- and rule-based AI systems. In these areas, he has published extensively and been awarded several NSF grants since 1976. Prior to that he worked in the area of circuits, systems, and applied graph theory.
Murata has served on the U.S. National Academy of Science/Computer Science and Technology Board. He served as the general chairman for the 1987 International Workshop on Petri Nets and Performance Models, Madison, WI. He is a member of steering committee for the annual International Conference on Application and Theory of Petri Nets and organized its 1993 conference in Chicago. He has served as an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, for which he received an IEEE Computer Society's Meritorious Service Award. He is currently serving as an associate editor for Journal of Circuits, Systems and Computers.
He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the IEICE, and a member of the following: ACM; European Association of Theoretical Computer Science; Information Processing Society of Japan; and Special Interest Group on Petri Nets and Related Systems Models, Gesellshaft fur Informatik, Germany. He is listed "Who's Who in America," among other publications.