May 21, 2025
In today’s tech-savvy world, it’s hard to imagine that in 1986, faculty, staff, and students at the University of Pittsburgh were still using floppy disks. But while the floppy disk may not have lasted past the late 1990s, other things at Pitt have been more constant, like the impact of Associate Professor Paul Munro.
Munro first came to Pitt that year to join what was then known as the Interdisciplinary Department of Information Science (IDIS) in the former School of Library and Information Science (SLIS). SLIS would come to be known as the School of Computing and Information (SCI) in 2017, when SLIS and the Department of Computer Science merged.
“When I was hired at Pitt, my background was mainly in physics, with some postdoctoral work in cognitive science, mainly specializing in neural networks – at that time, a relatively obscure area,” Munro said on his early days at Pitt. “When I was asked to teach a course on information theory, I had to learn some first, and it turned out to be quite helpful in my work on neural networks.”
After receiving his bachelor’s degree in physics from Rensselaear Polytechnic Institute in 1977, Munro headed to Brown University to pursue a PhD in physics, advised by Nobel Laureate Leon Cooper. After Brown University, Munro did his fair share of globe-trotting for two postdoctoral positions at the University of Trondheim in Norway and the University of California San Diego before landing at Pitt.
“I found a very active research environment spread across Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU),” Munro noted. “The Intelligent Systems Program (ISP) was founded the year after I arrived, which was very exciting.”
At the time, Munro notes that many researchers in artificial intelligence considered neural networks, his area of expertise, a curiosity at best. Through ISP, neural networks were increasingly tolerated and celebrated, and the open research environment between Pitt and CMU fostered further collaboration.
“I found fruitful interactions at Pitt’s newly formed Center for Neuroscience (CNUP) where I was welcomed with a joint appointment,” Munro said, “and I attended research meetings in psychology and computer science at CMU on a regular basis.”
Munro found further connections between Pitt and CMU in the mid-1990s when the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), a large collection of researchers from both universities (including Munro), was founded.
Munro, now an associate professor with SCI’s Department of Informatics and Networked Systems (DINS), has always been active on campus, from membership in Pitt’s Faculty Assembly, the University Senate, to the Senate Plant Utilization and Planning Committee of which he was chair for six years.
“Through these experiences, I found that Pitt is a complex entity, with hundreds or thousands of people devoted to supporting the mission of the University: facilities management, the registrar’s office, finance, building planning, landscaping, and more. It’s not just faculty and students!”
Munro now enters the next phase of his career, a retirement after nearly 40 years of connection and impact at Pitt.
Please join us in celebrating Paul Munro and his celebrated career at Pitt!