Andries "Andy" van Dam (born December 8, 1938) is a Dutch-American professor of computer science and former vice-president for research at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Van Dam has mentored undergraduates, other scholars, and practitioners in hypertext and computer graphics.

One of his students was Randy Pausch, who gained national renown in the process of dying from pancreatic cancer.

Danah boyd, Scott Draves, Dick Bulterman, Meredith Ringel Morris, Robert Sedgewick, Scott Snibbe, Andy Hertzfeld, and Steven K. Feiner also were students of Andy van Dam.

Van Dam is perhaps most known as the co-designer, along with Ted Nelson, of the first hypertext system, HES, in the late 1960s.

[2] Van Dam's continued interest in hypertext was crucial to the development of modern markup and browsing technology, and several of his students were instrumental in the origin of XML, XSLT, and related Web standards.

In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and a chaired professorship was recently endowed in his honor at Brown University.

[7] When the Brown Center for Information Technology was built, van Dam demanded it include showers and a Chinese restaurant.

The filmmakers, many of whom had van Dam as a professor, wanted to pay tribute to his pioneering work in computer graphics.