He is the founding chair and the William O. Baker Professor in Computer Science at Princeton University[1] and was a member of the board of directors of Adobe Systems (1990–2016).

[2] He previously served on the faculty at Brown University and has held visiting research positions at Xerox PARC, Institute for Defense Analyses, and INRIA.

[15] He solved open problems left by Donald Knuth in the analysis of quicksort,[16] shellsort,[17] heapsort (with R. Schaffer),[18] and Batcher's sort.

[20] In particular, in 1993, together with Rainer Kemp, Philippe Flajolet and Helmut Prodinger, he initiated a series of workshops and conferences which was key to the development of a research community around the analysis of algorithms, and which evolved into the AofA—International Meeting on Combinatorial, Probabilistic, and Asymptotic Methods in the Analysis of Algorithms.

[31] He advocates for expanding the reach of computer science,[32][33][34] with essays published in the Wall Street Journal[35] and Inside Higher Ed.

[36] According to his personal website, Sedgewick lives in Princeton, New Jersey and spends summers in Jamestown, Rhode Island with his wife Linda (née Migneault), married in 1971.