Joseph Lambert was a senior associate dean emeritus in the College of IST. He died on December 4, 2023.
Lambert had been a long-time academic leader in the computer sciences and engineering at Penn State. Before being named senior associate dean of the School of Information Sciences and Technology in 1999, Lambert had served as director of academic affairs for the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
Lambert joined the Penn State faculty in 1970 as an assistant professor of mathematics and was promoted to associate professor in 1976. In 1979, he was named assistant dean in the Eberly College and served in that capacity until 1982, leading the college’s commonwealth campus and continuing education initiatives.
During the latter two years of that period, Lambert also acted as head of computer science. After returning from a year as a visiting professor at Cornell University, he was formally selected head of the Department of Computer Science in 1982 and was named an associate professor of computer science and mathematics. During his nine-year tenure as department head, the unit experienced tremendous demand, with the student body peaking at 1,600.
From 1993 to 1997, Lambert oversaw the merging of the Department of Computer Science with the Department of Computer Engineering. In that role, he not only worked to bring faculty members of two disciplines together, he also helped lead a major curriculum revision for students of the merged unit. Lambert had been a faculty fellow in Penn State’s Institute for Innovations in Learning. He made frequent presentations at academic and professional conferences in his field and was widely published. The ISPA accorded him its best journal paper award. He was a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the American Society for Engineering Education, and the American Mathematical Society. Lambert held the academic rank of associate professor of information sciences and technology and computer science and engineering. His teaching and research interests included Fuzzy Decision Models, Simulation, and Numerical Methods.
