He then moved to Johns Hopkins University for his graduate studies, earning a master's degree in 1980 and a Ph.D. in 1982 under the supervision of S. Rao Kosaraju.
[3] Atallah has published over 200 papers on topics in algorithms and computer security.
Algorithmic research by Atallah includes papers on parallel and dynamic computational geometry,[5] finding the symmetries of geometric figures,[6] divide and conquer algorithms,[7] and efficient parallel computations of the Levenshtein distance between pairs of strings.
[8] With his student Marina Blanton, Atallah is the editor of the Algorithms and Theory of Computation Handbook (CRC Press, 2nd ed., 2009, ISBN 978-1-58488-818-5).
[1][13] Previously he received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation in 1985.