LAUSR

Dr Robert B. France was a pillar and a major contributor to the foundations of the field of model-driven engineering; his legacy is broad and will be long-lasting. Robert Bertrand France, born on 8 October 1960 in Jamaica, received his Bachelors in Natural Sciences – Computer Sciences and Mathematics, with firstclass honors in 1984 from the University of the West Indies, in Trinidad and Tobago. He was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to pursue his Doctorate in Computer Science at Massey University in New Zealand and graduated with his PhD in 1990. Dr France started his career in academia as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park. He later joined the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Florida Atlantic University, where he was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. Dr France then joined Colorado State University where he was promoted to Full Professor (France, 2018). Dr France has been recognized as a pioneer in model-driven engineering and software engineering who has shaped the field from two dimensions: research and building collaborative communities (Cheng, 2015). Dr Betty Cheng in her tribute to Dr France (Cheng, 2015) states that Dr France had numerous research activities with various collaborators across the globe focusing on the areas of formalizing modeling languages, aspect-oriented modeling, and models at run time. As a result of his research and collaborative activities, he received several prestigious awards during his career, including the Inaugural MODELS Career Award, a 5-year International Chair at INRIA, the French National Institute for research in Computational Sciences, the 2014 Senior Dahl-Nygaard Award, the Colorado State COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION 2018, VOL. 28, NO. 1, 109–112 https://doi.org/10.1080/08993408.2018.1493811