Rance Cleaveland

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Walter Rance Cleaveland II (July 18, 1961 – March 27, 2024) was an American computer scientist who specialized in software verification and software systems. He was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and died in Arlington, Virginia, at age 62. In 2022, he was named a Fellow of the IEEE for his work on verification tools for finite-state and cyber-physical systems.

Education and early career
Cleaveland earned a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science ( summa cum laude ) from Duke University in 1982. He then completed an MS (1985) and a PhD (1987) in Computer Science at Cornell University; his PhD thesis was Type-Theoretic Models of Concurrency, supervised by Robert Constable and mentored by Prakash Panangaden. He did postdoctoral research at the University of Sussex from 1987 to 1989.

Academic career and leadership
He started as an assistant professor at North Carolina State University in 1989, becoming an associate professor in 1994 and a full professor in 1998. Cleaveland then joined Stony Brook University, where he taught from 1998 to 2005, before moving to the University of Maryland, College Park as a professor of computer science. At Maryland, he held several leadership roles, including executive and scientific director of the Fraunhofer USA Center for Experimental Software Engineering (2005–2014) and, starting in November 2022, Associate Dean of Research in the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. He also held joint appointments with UMIACS and the Institute for Systems Research and directed NSF’s Computing and Communication Foundations program from 2018 to 2022. Cleaveland was a longtime contributor to the research community, co-founding TACAS (since 1995) and co-editing the journal Software Tools for Technology Transfer (1997–2001).

Honors and family
His honors included the ONR/National Young Investigator Award (1992), the Alcoa Foundation Engineering Research Achievement Award (1994), and the SAE Excellence in Oral Presentation Award (2008). He became a Senior Member of IEEE in 2021 and was named an IEEE Fellow in 2022. Cleaveland grew up in Baltimore and attended the McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he later received an Alumni Achievement Award (1993) and had a need-based scholarship named after him. He married Karen Ann Hardee in 1988, and they had three children: Matthew Rance, Christian Gilbert, and Rachel Grace.

Legacy
Rance Cleaveland’s career spanned academia, industry collaboration, and leadership in software engineering research, leaving a lasting impact on verification tools and education in computer science.