Ralph Johnson is a professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois. He mixes teaching there with industrial consulting. He is one of the leading pattern experts, and an expert on software reuse and object-oriented design. One of the fathers of modern refactoring, he helped to coin the term refactoring in his work on Dr. Opdyke's dissertation on the subject.
Ralph Johnson has been working with objects since 1985. He has taught hundreds of people Smalltalk, some of whom are now widely recognized Smalltalk experts. His university course is taught over the internet.
He has worked on frameworks for compilers, operating systems, music synthesis, graphics editors, telephone billing systems, and insurance. He is recognized as an expert on object-oriented design and frameworks, having taught tutorials on framework design five times at OOPSLA, and consulted and taught framework design for many companies.
He is one of the four authors of the best selling "Design Patterns", and has been working with patterns for a long time, writing the first paper at OOPSLA on patterns (in 1992) and helping organize PLoP'94, the first conference on software patterns.
Ralph has been focusing on building success in software development by looking at ways to reduce the development cycle. This has lead to his involvement with eXtreme Programming which he has recently sponsored as a four-week workshop at the University of Illinois for both Industry and Graduate level students.