Alumni Highlight 

DR. STAN FRANKLIN (1949) graduated from the then Memphis State College with a BS in mathematics and a minor in physics in 1949. After a PhD (UCLA, 1963, mathematics), an NSF postdoc (Univ. of Washington), and faculty positions at the University of Florida, Carnegie Mellon University and the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur) he returned to Memphis State University in 1972 as Professor and Chairman of the Department of Mathematics (later Mathematical Sciences). 

Franklin’s employment project was to transform a teaching department into a teaching and research department that could award PhDs. He received the 1997 the Willard R. Sparks Eminent Faculty Award, the highest distinction given to a faculty member by the University, as well as other department awards. He was the chairman of the Department of Computer Science in 1982 when it split off from the Department of Mathematical Sciences during which the program became one of the first in the world to offer a computer literacy curriculum (Stan Franklin, "A Lab for All Seasons," PC Magazine, Dec. 1982). He was a founder of the successful Institute for Intelligent Systems (IIS), along with Art Graesser (Psychology) and Terry Horgan (Philosophy). After more than thirty years, its members produce outstanding research, and still sponsor the Cognitive Science Seminar attracting an audience of fifty or so participants from all over the University and a few from the city. The IIS brings in a large portion of the University's external research funding.

He officially retired in December of 2013 at the age of 81 after more than forty years of service to the university. His research has continued after retirement, yielding over all almost 300 published papers that have, as of this morning, been cited 13179 times.

Dr. Franklin guided twenty-five doctoral students to completion, mostly at the University of Memphis. Two doctoral students have completed since his retirement, and he is currently working with two others (one in Computer Science and one in Biomedical Engineering).

For the past twenty-five years, his research has been on cognitive modeling (how minds work) using our LIDA model. The work has been well received as attested to by close to 500 citations a year in recent years and several entries in Wikipedia (Stan Franklin, LIDA (cognitive architecture), sequential space.

Thank you, Dr. Franklin, for your service and continued commitment to the College and University.

Additional Resources

Wikipedia Entries on LIDA (cognitive architecture): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIDA_(cognitive_architecture)

Past two decades of papers and research: https://ccrg.cs.memphis.edu/papers.html

1982 PC Magazine: https://www.memphis.edu/cs/pdfs/1982_pc_magazine_comp_literacy.pdf

Department of Computer Science https://www.memphis.edu/cs/

Institute for Intelligent Systems (IIS) https://www.memphis.edu/iis/