Dr. Peter W. Day retired in April 2016 from his position as Enterprise Middleware Admin IV at Emory University.
PROSPER, TX, July 02, 2019 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to present Peter W. Day, PhD, with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. An accomplished listee, Dr. Day celebrates many years' experience in his professional network, and has been noted for achievements, leadership qualities, and the credentials and successes he has accrued in his field. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
After garnering a laudable reputation in the field of computer services and software for 44 years, Dr. Day retired in April 2016 from his position as Enterprise Middleware Admin IV at Emory University.
Dr. Day received his first exposure to computers and programming during the summer following his graduation from high school as the result of his father, a chemistry professor at Emory University, giving him access to a desk-sized LGP-30 computer recently obtained by that department. He continued to develop his interest in computers while majoring in mathematics as an undergraduate at Emory, giving a presentation to the Emory Math Club on how to program the LGP-30, and writing software for the LGP-30 that included a statistical program for a psychology experiment, a Turing machine simulator, and a program to arrange swimming match playoffs for the Physical Education Department.
In his senior year, Dr. Day authored the answers to exercises for a mathematics textbook published by one of his professors and worked part time for the Emory Biomedical Data Processing and Analysis Center (EBDPAC). During this time when general-purpose computers were large and expensive, and many capabilities common today were unavailable, he wrote statistical and utility software, a program to solve a differential equation for a professor in the Physics Department, and a package that enabled researchers to present their data visually by drawing graphs and charts on a mechanical plotter connected to the EBDPAC IBM 1410 mainframe. Also, the use of a matchmaking program that he created for an Emory student organization was written up in the student and city newspapers. When it was uncommon to use a computer to assist in obtaining a mathematical result, Dr. Day used the IBM 1410 along with mathematical shortcuts he developed to determine the non-existence of a certain mathematical object for his paper as a Career Scholar. Since the computation took many days, he developed a way to pause the program, write out its entire state, and later read the state and resume the program where it left off.
After earning a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from Emory in 1966, Dr. Day pursued a Doctor of Philosophy in mathematics at the California Institute of Technology under a National Science Foundation fellowship while also programming Caltech's IBM 7094 mainframe and taking several courses in computer science. His presentation of results from his thesis, Rearrangements of Measurable Functions, at the New York meeting of the American Mathematical Society in March 1970 resulted in many requests for copies. After graduating later that spring he began a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship in mathematics in the fall at Carnegie Mellon University, during which he wrote three mathematics papers that were subsequently published. In 1972 Dr. Day accepted an offer from his alma mater to serve as manager of Operating System Support for the institution's four-year-old Emory University Computing Center (EUCC), which had been created by renaming EBDPAC and giving it a university-wide mission with responsibility for academic, research, instructional activities, and administrative data processing.
Dr. Day progressed through myriad technical and leadership roles at Emory's central computing and information technology division for the remainder of his career, holding management and director positions throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s, followed by technical leadership and software development roles until his retirement.
For decades, Dr. Day pioneered new services and software at Emory and was able to adjust to new roles and still excel. In 1974 he established EUCC's first User Services department, then later became the coordinator of that department as well as system support and operations. During 1977-1981 when the use of microcomputers for word processing and file transfer was in its infancy, Dr. Day wrote and presented nine papers on topics that included his innovative uses of and enhancements to the Emory mainframe's VS/9 system software, his Tektronix 4010 graphics terminal emulation and file transfer program for the Apple II microcomputer, and his mainframe technical word processing system, which was competitive with commercial products of that time and was used by students and faculty to create and print theses and research papers.
During the 1980s while directing EUCC Academic Computing, Dr. Day was a driving force behind creating a campus network, getting campus computers connected to it, and connecting the network to various external academic and research networks of the time. In the latter part of the 1980s, he wrote the grant request that obtained funding to enable Emory to have a faster, more affordable connection to the Internet via NSFNET, the precursor of the commercial Internet.
In the early 1990s while in charge of special projects, research, and planning, Dr. Day introduced and used formal methods for strategic planning, Hoshin Planning, and software product selection. In particular, he led a group representing various campus constituencies in the selection of a new electronic mail system for the university. The university's Academic Computing Advisory Committee praised his report and accepted its recommendations. In the late 1990s, while in charge of research, planning and emerging technologies, he wrote a successful grant request and provided technical leadership to get Emory connected to the high-speed Internet2 research network, which greatly contributed to Emory's ability to interact remotely with researchers and scientific instruments throughout the world to collect and share scientific data. He also helped the university develop IT architecture and standards by leading task forces of Emory IT professionals in creating content for IT architecture documents that he wrote and which the university's IT Council approved in 2001.
Throughout the 2000s Dr. Day introduced and authored web applications to reduce overhead and increase customer satisfaction by enabling customers to do more via self-service. In 2005 he became a charter member of Emory's newly established Identity Management group, where he provided technical leadership and assistance in selecting, implementing, and migrating to the university's first purchased identity management system. In 2008 Dr. Day enabled Emory to more easily take advantage of web applications running outside Emory by creating software that sent authorization for a user's login access along with their identity to external web applications based on the user's local Emory login to his software.
In the 2010s Dr. Day became the Emory single-sign-on expert, providing consulting and specialized, non-standard programming to support Emory user logins to off-campus services. He also provided online directory access to Emory's mobile app and created an authorization service to enable Emory applications to give controlled access to non-Emory people. During most of his time before retirement, he worked as a team member on a project to select, implement, and migrate to a new identity management system, doing planning and software development, and providing technical leadership and assistance to staff and consultants. Just prior to his retirement Dr. Day was one of the recipients of the first Emory central IT Significant Contribution Award for his contributions to the success of that project.
Dr. Day has been recognized as a fellow of organizations such as Phi Beta Kappa and Alpha Epsilon Upsilon and has won accolades including the Bausch & Lomb Honorary Science Award and the Hamilton Watch Science Award. Throughout his professional endeavors, Dr. Day has maintained membership in like-minded groups, namely the American Mathematics Society and the Association for Computing Machinery.
Aside from his Emory duties, Dr. Day used his experience in strategic planning to evaluate the state of computing at Morehouse School of Medicine and provided them with a report containing recommendations for improving and expanding IT services, which they accepted for implementation. Outside his career in information technology, Dr. Day remained engaged with mathematics as an adjunct professor in the Emory Mathematics and Computer Science department from 1973 to 1986, teaching calculus, database design, theory of computation, and queuing network models of computer system performance. He also published his fourth mathematics paper in 1979 and wrote over 100 mathematical reviews from 1976 to 2018. Post-retirement, he does mathematical research, takes care of his wife, goes on daily walks, spends time with his extended family, and plays musical instruments.
In recognition of outstanding contributions to his profession and the Marquis Who's Who community, Dr. Day has been featured on the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement website. Please visit www.ltachievers.com for more information about this honor.
About Marquis Who's Who®
Since 1899, when A. N. Marquis printed the First Edition of Who's Who in America®, Marquis Who's Who® has chronicled the lives of the most accomplished individuals and innovators from every significant field of endeavor, including politics, business, medicine, law, education, art, religion and entertainment. Today, Who's Who in America® remains an essential biographical source for thousands of researchers, journalists, librarians and executive search firms around the world. Marquis® now publishes many Who's Who titles, including Who's Who in America®, Who's Who in the World®, Who's Who in American Law®, Who's Who in Medicine and Healthcare®, Who's Who in Science and Engineering®, and Who's Who in Asia®. Marquis® publications may be visited at the official Marquis Who's Who® website at www.marquiswhoswho.com.
# # #