Rick Adrion is Professor Emeritus in the School of Computer Science (SCS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Adrion, with Renee Fall (UMass), Mark Guzdial (Georgia Tech) and Barbara Ericson (Georgia Tech), directs the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance. ECEP is designed to increase the pipeline of women and underrepresented minorities entering K-20 education pathways. He co-leads the Education and Outreach working group for the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center, an UMass-MIT-BU-Harvard-NEU consortium. Adrion has been involved with multimedia systems for teaching and learning (RIPPLES Group) since 1995 and with software engineering since 1975. [see links above]

Adrion was chair of the UMass CS Department from 1986-1994. He founded and, from 1988-2000, served as president and chair of the board of the Applied Computing Systems Institute of Massachusetts --- a corporation designed to transfer technology developed at the University of Massachusetts.

Previously, he held full-time positions with The University of Texas, Austin, Oregon State University, the National Science Foundation, and the National Bureau of Standards, and he held adjunct, visiting, and/or sabbatical positions at American University, Georgetown University, the University of California, Berkeley, the National Science Foundation, and Universite' de Paris-Sud Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique.

Adrion was the founder and served as Editor in Chief of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology . Adrion is a fellow of the ACM and of the AAAS and received distinguished service awards from the University, ACM-SIGSOFT and the Computing Research Association.