Douglas S. Lea is a professor of computer science and (as of 2026) head of the computer science department at State University of New York at Oswego, where he specializes in concurrent programming and the design of concurrent data structures. He was on the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process and chaired JSR 166, which added concurrency utilities to the Java programming language (see Java concurrency). On October 22, 2010, Doug Lea notified the Java Community Process Executive Committee he would not stand for reelection. Lea was re-elected as an at-large member for the 2012 OpenJDK governing board.
Publications He wrote Concurrent Programming in Java: Design Principles and Patterns, one of the first books about the subject. In 2000, a second edition was released. He is also the author of dlmalloc,gee.cs.oswego.edu/pub/misc/ a widely used public-domain implementation of malloc.
Awards In 2010, he won the senior Dahl-Nygaard Prize.
In 2013, he became a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.ACM Names Fellows for Computing Advances that Are Transforming Science and Society , Association for Computing Machinery, accessed 2013-12-10.
Bibliography Concurrent Programming in Java: Design Principles and Patterns, first edition: 1997; second edition: , 1999 Java Concurrency in Practice, , 2006 (co-authored with Joshua Bloch, Brian Goetz, Tim Peierls, Joseph Bowbeer, and David Holmes)
References
External links Doug Lea's home page Concurrent Programming in Java: Design Principles and Patterns Java Community Process Executive Committee JSR 166: Concurrency Utilities