Peter C. Patton

Responsible for the development of the Intranet and Internet programs at the University of Pennsylvania, Patton has had over 50 years of experience in the computer industry, with involvement in computer hardware and software development since 1955. He has served as a Professor of Quantitative Methods and Computer Science at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota, and also Chairman of Agilenty Consulting Group. He taught at the Universities of Minnesota, Paris, and Stuttgart and held the position of Chief Information Officer at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds Engineering and Mathematics degrees from Harvard, Kansas, and Stuttgart.

He served as Chief Technologist at Lawson Software from 1996 to 2002 and was Lawson's representative on the Technical Advisory Committee of IBM's SanFrancisco Java Framework project. Lawson builds Internet-compliant client/server financial management information systems using relational database management technology. Lawson was ranked among the leading client/server business application vendors by International Data Corporation, and was listed among the top five vendors of client/server financial applications by Price Waterhouse LLP and Information Week.

Prior to accepting his position at Lawson Software, Patton served as Vice Provost for Information Systems and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) from 1991–96. He left his position at the University in May 1996 to accept the position of Chief Technologist at Lawson Software in Minneapolis, which actively explored his research specialty, parallel processing. Under his leadership, the University extended its Ethernet fiberoptic WAN from 8000 to 16000 IP addresses and established a major Internet presence; consolidating academic and administrative mainframes; launching Project Cornerstone, a multi-year effort to re-engineer business processes, designing a new principles-based information architecture, and deploying a new financial management system. It developed ResNet, a five-year program to network all residence halls for data, voice, and video, and rolled out several client/server applications.

Most recently he co-chaired, with Professor James O'Donnell, the University-wide Task Force to Restructure Computing Services across Penn. In addition, Patton was responsible for the development of several functional intranets that delivered academic and administrative content directly to students. A technologist and scholar of remarkable breadth and accomplishment, he also served the University as Adjunct Professor of Computer Science and Lecturer in Mathematics, served on the SAS committee to establish an undergraduate Ancient Studies curriculum, and participated in the Sumerian Dictionary project at the University Museum. He also served as an Adjunct Professor of Old Testament and Biblical Hebrew at a Bible college in Villanova.

He holds two patents in the automatic generation of business software applications, is a Chartered Mathematician in the United Kingdom, and a Fellow of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications. Patton was recruited to Penn in 1991 from a private consulting practice in which his clients included the National Technology Transfer Center, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the DataQuest division of Dun and Bradstreet. Previously he was founding Director of the Minnesota Supercomputer Institute; Vice-President and Director of the Parallel Processing Architecture program at MCC in Austin, Texas; and Director of Computing at the University of Minnesota, where he held faculty appointments in Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering, Ancient Studies, and Classical Civilizations.

He has also consulted and published widely around the world; Patton is the author of several books, monographs and book chapters, and numerous journal articles in several research fields. His avocational computing interest is Sumerian lexicography, and he has continued as a research colleague of Penn's Sumerian Dictionary project over the Internet.