It is with great sadness that the Computing Laboratory mourns the death of David Shrimpton, who died on Saturday 29 December 2007 in the Kent and Canterbury Hospital, Canterbury. David was diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas and bile duct in January 2007, and throughout his illness was remarkably positive about his condition and his circumstances, and was very much helped in this by his wife Terry and his children Ian and Hannah.

After a first career in mental health nursing, David studied Computer Science at Oxford Brookes University, remaining there to complete his PhD and subsequently to stay on as a member of staff. In 1998 David joined the Computing Laboratory as a Lecturer, and in his nine years in the department he contributed hugely to its life and work.

In his most recent role as Head of Teaching, it was David’s role to negotiate and agree staff teaching loads, and he always accomplished this onerous task smoothly and with great good humour. The reason that it ran so well – and this was something that he brought to all his interactions with students and staff – was his uncanny ability to understand other people, and what made them tick. This empathy made David an excellent teacher, on both undergraduate and postgraduate courses, as well as an outstanding PhD supervisor, who will be very much missed by his present and past research students.

When David joined the Lab his main research interests were in distributed systems and support for multimedia applications, particularly the convergence of digital television and Internet technologies. This led more recently to interest in many aspects of the World Wide Web. David played a key role as evangelist for new web technologies, and had taught a number of tutorials for the World Organization of Webmasters. Its Executive Director, Bill Cullifer, said “David was an amazing man and he’ll be missed.” David was also the Computing Lab’s representative on the World Wide Web Consortium; the Chief Executive of the W3C, Steve Bratt, also extended his condolences to David’s friends and family.

In tribute to David’s life and work, the Computing Laboratory will be planting a tree on the campus later in the spring.

Authored by Simon Thompson
Published 14 January 2008
University of Kent