Larry Snyder was the chairman of the National Research Council's (NRC) committee that issued the report “Being Fluent with Information Technology." It is this NRC committee, funded by the National Science Foundation, that identified the three types of knowledge needed for fluency.

He is a graduate from the University of Iowa (BA '68, mathematics and economics) and Carnegie Mellon University (PhD '73, computer science). Before joining the University of Washington in 1983, Larry taught on the faculties of Yale ('73-'80) and Purdue ('80-'83), and was a visiting scholar at UW ('79-''80). He has also been a visiting scholar at MIT and Harvard ('87-'88) and a visiting professor at Sydney University ('94-'95).
Fellow of the IEEE and of the ACM.

Some of Larry Snyder's research accomplishments include the following:

• Designed and implemented the first field-programmable gate array ('79), a circuit with 31 two-input functions fabricated in 6u nMOS. Invented the Configurable, Highly Parallel (CHiP) architecture ('80), which first introduced field-programmable interconnect.
• Designed and with colleagues implemented Poker ('82), the first parallel programming environment, which was developed for the CHiP architecture and its simulator, the Pringle.
• Created the concept of a "type architecture" ('86), and applied it to predict (a) extracting parallelism from Fortran programs would be generally unsuccessful, and (b) parallel programmers would choose non-shared memory programming models, e.g. message passing. Proposed the CTA, an abstract parallel computer.
  
• Invented Chaos Routing with Smaragda Konstantinidou ('89), the first randomizing, non-minimal adaptive packet routing algorithm, and introduced the concept of "probabilistic livelock freedom".
  
• Developed with colleagues the ZPL Array Programming Language ('93), based on the CTA machine model and the Phase Abstractions programming model. ZPL has demonstrated performance, portability and convenience. ZPL was publicly released in July, 1997, and is in use by a growing community of users.