Winner of the 2021 Computer Science and Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award, Michigan State University College of Engineering
Patrick J. Flynn is professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He has held the Fritz Duda Family Professorship in the College of Engineering at Notre Dame since 2014, where he is also a concurrent professor of electrical engineering.
Flynn earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at MSU in 1985, followed by a master's degree in 1986 and Ph.D. in 1990, both in computer science at MSU.
During his years at MSU, he lived in six different residence halls as well as three different off-campus apartment complexes - since he was enrolled in classes or conducting research at MSU continuously from September 1981 through March 1990. He took one three-month break for an internship in 1987.
He started research work at MSU in 1984 in the biomedical signal processing laboratory operated by Marvin Siegel and Roland Zapp in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Systems Science. From 1986 to 1990, he worked in the PRIP Lab and completed his dissertation under the direction of University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Anil Jain.
At the start of graduate school, he met Laurie Starr (MS '86) in an advanced matrix theory class. After an MSU courtship involving many dates at El Azteco, they married in 1988.
Flynn held faculty positions at Notre Dame (1990-1991, 2001-present), Washington State University (1991-1998), and Ohio State University (1998-2001). In 2007-2008, he held a visiting scientist appointment at the National Institute of Standards and Technology during a sabbatical leave.
In 2016-2017, Flynn served as Provost Fellow and Director of Notre Dame California, with oversight for all of Notre Dame's research and educational activities in the state. During that year, he designed and led the pilot offering of the Silicon Valley Semester, which enrolls Notre Dame students in a semester of full-time coursework and part-time internship work at a variety of Bay Area companies.
His research interests include computer vision, biometrics, and image processing. He has advised or co-advised 21 Ph.D. dissertations, 10 postdoctoral fellows, 21 master's theses and two bachelor's theses. His research has produced two patents and one commercial technology license. He has been involved in several entrepreneurial ventures including several start-up companies, one of which won Notre Dame's McCloskey Business Plan competition in 2013.
He is an IEEE Fellow, an IAPR Fellow, and an ACM Distinguished Scientist. He was the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Biometrics Compendium from 2016-2017 and is a past associate editor-in-chief of IEEE Trans. on PAMI, and a past associate editor of IEEE TIFS, IEEE TIP, IEEE TPAMI, Pattern Recognition, and Pattern Recognition Letters.
He has received outstanding teaching awards from Washington State University and the University of Notre Dame, and Meritorious Service, Golden Core, Certificate of Achievement, and Technical Achievement awards from the IEEE Computer Society.
When the current health crisis allows, Flynn plays bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, and baritone saxophone in various concert bands in the South Bend area. He has also arranged several compositions for Notre Dame's clarinet choir.
Flynn and his wife have two grown children: Daniel is an Indiana University alumnus and a software developer living in Houston with his wife Leslie, and Helen is a Purdue alumna and a research scientist at Eli Lilly. The couple volunteered extensively with their children's school band programs.
Today, they live just north of the Notre Dame campus and are raising their second dog and their sixth cat.