Tadao Murata, PhD, an accomplished researcher and highly respected colleague during his time at the University of Illinois Chicago, was an expert in Petri net theory and its applications, especially to software engineering, soft computing, and the modeling and analysis of concurrent and/or distributed systems, logic- and rule-based AI systems. He published extensively in these areas throughout his career, and his work was funded by multiple National Science Foundation grants. Before establishing his research focus in Petri net theory, Murata worked in the area of circuits, systems, and applied graph theory.

Murata received his BS in electronics from Tokai University, Tokyo, in 1962, and earned an MS and PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1964 and 1966, respectively. Upon his passing in 2021, Murata was a UIC distinguished professor emeritus in the computer science department, where he joined the faculty in 1966. During occasional leaves of absence, he also taught at the University of California Berkeley, Tokai University, and Osaka University in Toyonaka, Japan, where he was the Endowed Hitachi-Chair Professor in 1993-1994. Murata was an invited visiting researcher at C. A. Petri’s Institute at GMD, mbH, Germany, and in several research institutes and universities in Europe.

Murata served on the U.S. National Academy of Science/Computer Science and Technology Board. He was general chairman for the 1987 International Workshop on Petri Nets and Performance Models and a member of steering committee for the annual International Conference on Application and Theory of Petri Nets, whose 1993 conference in Chicago he helped to organize. He was an editor for IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, for which he received an IEEE Computer Society’s Meritorious Service Award, and an associate editor for the Journal of Circuits, Systems and Computers.

For his excellence in scholarship, Murata received numerous awards, including a distinguished faculty award from the president of the University of Illinois system, 1990; the IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Award, 1991; Golden Core Charter Membership in the IEEE Computer Society on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, 1996; a UIC College of Engineering Faculty Research Award, 1998; the first-ever Carl Adam Petri Distinguished Technical Achievement Award, 2000; and the title of UIC Distinguished Professor, 2002.

Murata was a Life Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the IEICE, and a member of the Special Interest Group on Petri Nets and Related Systems Models, Gesellshaft fur Informatik, Germany. He was listed “Who’s Who in America,” among other publications.