John H Reif

Timeline

1. 1973–1977

   Degrees at Tufts and Harvard

   He earns a B.S. from Tufts in 1973, an M.S. from Harvard in 1975, and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1977.

2. 1983–1986

   Harvard to Duke

   He serves as an associate professor at Harvard from 1983 to 1986, then joins Duke as a professor of computer science in 1986.

3. By 1993

   Robotics complexity and parallel algorithms

   His work gives the first hardness proofs for robotic motion planning and develops efficient randomized and parallel algorithms. In 1993, he publishes the book Synthesis of Parallel Algorithms.

4. 1997

   An ACM Fellowship

   He becomes an ACM Fellow in 1997.

5. 2004–2023

   DNA computation and learning

   In 2004, he presents a Tufts chemistry seminar on self-assembled DNA nanostructures for molecular-scale patterning, computation, and motors. In 2023, he coauthors a survey on molecular-scale learning systems related to DNA computing.

6. October 2025

   The Neural CRNs framework

   In October 2025, he coauthors Neural CRNs, a supervised-learning framework built from deterministic chemical reaction networks. Its circuits model linear and nonlinear classification and are tested on regression and classification tasks.

7. 2025–2026

   Duke professor and AI investigator

   He is Duke's A. Hollis Edens Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and a professor in its Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science department. In Spring 2026, he teaches Advanced Topics in Computer Science and serves as principal investigator for DARPA's Molecular-Scale AI Via DNA Computing project, funded for 2025–2026.