Kent Pitman holds a B.S. in Philosophy and Linguistics from MIT. There he authored a few libraries for the EMACS text editor, created a Fortran to Lisp translator, and published his first two of many papers. Soon after graduating, at England’s Open University, he designed and implemented an early (pre-web) hypertext editor. Kent has participated heavily in design and implementation of the Lisp and Scheme programming languages. He was co-author of the Revised^5 Report on Scheme, and served as both a major technical contributor and Project Editor for creation of the American National Standard for Common Lisp, X3.226-1994. Later he was also a technical contributor, United States Representative, and Project Editor for the International Standard for ISLISP, ISO/IEC 13816:1997(E).

On his personal time, Kent has participated as an implementor, administrator, and user of a variety of cyber communities, and blogs on issues of social justice. He has chaired two small conferences, and participated as on the paper review committee for some others.

In professional settings, he has held positions from programmer to CTO at companies he’s worked for. He’s programmed both the internals and the user interface in domains as varied as symbolic algebra, expert systems technology, document format translation, document display and print rendering, web server technology, retail store security video, and hospital scheduling. At DBMI's Park Lab, Kent has a technical leadership role in development of the secure cloud infrastructure, application features, and supporting technology that underly CGAP, the Clinical Genome Analysis Platform.