Joseph "Joe" Lawrence Zachary is an American computer scientist and professor at the University of Utah.
[1] He was influential in promoting a new approach to teaching scientific programming to beginning science and engineering students.
Joseph Zachary received his PhD in 1987, his SM in 1983, and his SB in 1979, all in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 1999 he received the IEEE Computer Science and Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award for "outstanding and sustained contributions to undergraduate computational science education, including writing innovative textbooks, developing innovative online educational materials, and teaching an exemplary introductory scientific programming course".
[3] As part of his work as a charter member of the United States Department of Energy Undergraduate Computational Engineering and Science (UCES) Project, he wrote two introductory scientific programming textbooks, the first in 1996 and the second in 1998, and developed an extensive suite of interactive courseware to accompany them.