Nir Shavit received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in 1984 and 1986, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1990. Shavit is a co-author of the book The Art of Multiprocessor Programming. He is a recipient of the 2004 Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science for his work on applying tools from algebraic topology to model shared memory computability and of the 2012 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing for the introduction of Software Transactional Memory. 

His interests are techniques for designing, implementing, and reasoning about multiprocessor algorithms.  He is also interested in understanding how neural tissue computes and is part of an effort to do so by extracting connectivity maps of brain, a field called connectomics. Nir is the principal investigator of the Multiprocessor Algorithmics Group and the Computational Connectomics Group.