Walter Savitch is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of California at San Diego. ("Professor Emeritus" means he's retired. But, he still is active in the field.)
He received his PhD in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969. Since that time he has been on the faculty of the University of California in San Diego (UCSD). He served as director of the UCSD Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Cognitive Science for over ten years. He has served as a visiting researcher at the Computer Science departments of the University of Washington in Seattle and and at the University of Colorado in Boulder and has been a visiting scholar at the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica in Amsterdam.
Professor Savitch's research areas include complexity theory, formal language theory, computational linguistics, and the development of computer science education materials. He is well known for his work in complexity theory which includes the first example of a complete language, namely a language complete for the storage class log n. This fundamental work led directly to the now widespread interest in complete problems. He has also done important work on the theories of nondeterministic and parallel computation models. Most recently his interests have centered on formal and computational linguistics and on computer science education.
In addition to numerous research articles and various editorial projects, Professor Savitch has written a number of well know Computer Science text books.