In a ceremony on 14 July 2005 following the Fifth UK Memory Management Network Workshop, held as part of Glagow's Research Festival 2005, the Principal of Glasgow University, Sir Muir Russell, presented Richard Jones with an Honorary Fellowship in recognition of

"his international distinction through his research and scholarship in dynamic memory management and 'garbage collection', [...] his associations with Computing Science at Glasgow, and the esteem in which he is held throughout the computing world".

Richard is the only computer scientist ever to have been made an Honorary Fellow of Glasgow University.

The oration (by Prof. David Watt) noted that Richard has been at the forefront of this research since the 1980s. His worldwide collaborations have yielded internationally-recognized developments including the Beltway framework and GCspy. He is the author of Garbage Collection: Algorithms for Automatic Dynamic Memory Management, which since its publication in 1996 has become the definitive book in this area and required reading for every serious student. He is in continual demand as a reviewer for leading international journals and conferences.

In 1998, Richard founded the International Symposium in Memory Management (ISMM), the leading conference series in this field, and he has acted as a chair of the SPACE Semantics, Program Analysis and Computing Environment s for Memory Management workshops (which seek to bring together theoreticians and practitioners) in 2004 and 2006. He is the coordinator of MMnet, the EPSRC-funded memory management network, which brings together twelve UK universities including Glasgow and Kent, and leading companies including IBM and Microsoft. He is one of the most highly-cited researchers in the worldwide computer science community ( http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/allcited.html).

IBM awarded Richard an internationally-competitive IBM Faculty Award in each of 2003, 2004 and 2005. One of his PhD students (Andy King, a Glasgow University graduate) won the internationally-prestigious 2003 ACM Graduate Student Research Competition.

The Department of Computer Science at Glasgow is internationally recognised for its research. It currently has 39 academic staff, 70 research students and 37 research assistants and fellows in the Department. It currently hosts 24 EPSRC-funded research projects, 6 EC-funded projects, 7 industrially funded projects, and several research fellowships. The current grants and fellowships total more than �6M. The Department was rated 5 in the 2001 RAE, and is designated as 'excellent' for quality in teaching in the Scottish Assessment of teaching quality.