![[Image of Damian Conway]](http://damian.conway.org/damian.jpg "Image by James Duncan Davidson/O'Reilly Media")
Damian Conway holds a B.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science.
A widely sought-after speaker and trainer, he is also the author of numerous well-known software modules including: Parse::RecDescent (a sophisticated parsing tool), Class::Contract (design-by-contract programming in Perl), Lingua::EN::Inflect (rule-based English transformations for text generation), Class::Multimethods (multiple dispatch polymorphism), Text::Autoformat (intelligent automatic reformatting of plaintext), Switch (Perl's missing case statement), NEXT (resumptive method dispatch), Filter::Simple (Perl-based source code manipulation), Quantum::Superpositions (auto-parallelization of serial code using a quantum mechanical metaphor), and Lingua::Romana::Perligata (programming in Latin). All of this software is available free from your local CPAN mirror.
A well-known member of the international Perl community, Damian was the winner of the 1998, 1999, and 2000 Larry Wall Awards for Practical Utility. The best technical paper at the annual Perl Conference was subsequently named in his honour. He is a member of the technical committee for The Perl Conference, a keynote speaker at many Open Source conferences, a former columnist for "The Perl Journal", and author of the books "Object Oriented Perl" and "Perl Best Practices". In 2001 Damian received the first "Perl Foundation Development Grant" and spent 20 months working on projects for the betterment of Perl.
Currently he runs an international IT training company – Thoughtstream – which provides programmer training from beginner to masterclass level throughout Europe, North America, and Australasia.
He is also an honorary Associate Professor with the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia.
Most of his time is currently spent working with Larry Wall on the design of the new Perl 6 programming language and producing explanatory documents exploring Larry's design decisions.
Other technical and academic areas in which he has published internationally include programming language design, programmer education, object orientation, software engineering, natural language generation, synthetic language generation, emergent systems, declarative programming, image morphing, human-computer interaction, geometric modelling, the psychophysics of perception, nanoscale simulation, and parsing.