Geneva Belford

University of Illinois computer science Professor Emerita Geneva Belford died on March 4, 2014. Professor Belford positively influenced students at the University of Illinois for almost 50 years, first as a professor of Mathematics, next as a professor of Computer Science, and then as the CS Department’s Graduate Program Coordinator, even after her official retirement in 2000. After completing a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, Belford came to the University of Illinois as a mathematics PhD student, graduating in 1960. She then joined the Chemistry Department as a research associate until 1964, when she became an assistant professor of Mathematics. In 1972, she joined the Center for Advanced Computation as a research assistant professor, and in 1976 she was promoted to research associate professor. Professor Belford joined the Department of Computer Science in 1977. She was promoted to full professor in 1982. Over the course of her career, she supervised 34 CS PhD dissertations and 153 CS MS theses. She often had as many as 15 students working with her, covering a wide range of interests in the general areas of databases and distributed systems.