After receiving the PhD degree in Chemical Physics in 1969, Michael Lesk joined the computer science research group at Bell Laboratories, where he worked until 1984. From 1984 to 1995 he managed the computer science research group at Bellcore, and from 1998 to 2002 he was in charge of theDivision of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National ScienceFoundation. Since 2003 he has been Professor of Library and InformationScience at Rutgers University.
He is best known for work in digital libraries, and his book "UnderstandingDigital Libraries" was published in 2004 by Morgan Kaufmann (second edition of a 1997 book). His research has included the CORE project for chemical information, early work on sense disambiguation, and he wrote Unixsystem utilities including those for tables, mail, and lexical analysis.
