Fred Leise, Associate Founder

Fred Leise (B.S. Mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park) Is a taxonomist, including working as the senior taxonomist for K Street Partners; he has been a back-of-book indexer since 1995, specializing in scholarly works in the humanities. He is a certificate holder from the University of Chicago Publishing Program, where he studied indexing with Leah Hotimlanska.

He taught indexing for the University of Chicago Publishing Program and Columbia College Chicago. He currently is an instructor for the University of California, Berkeley Extension Division’s course on indexing, for which he wrote the unit on taxonomies.

His index to Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf by Panthea Reid, was one of three indexes on the shortlist for the 1998 ASI/H.W. Wilson Award in Indexing; his online index for PeopleSoft.com won an Australian Society of Indexers Web Site Index Award, 2002–2004.

Fred has taught workshops on indexing, information architecture and taxonomy design across the United States, as well as in England, Malaysia and Brunei. He has authored a number of articles on those topics, including co-authoring a series of seminal articles on controlled vocabularies for the online journal BoxesandArrows.com.

He is the co-editor of two volumes in the American Society for Indexing’s publication series: Indexing for Editors and Authors: A Practical Guide to Understanding Indexes, and Indexing Specialties: Cookbooks.  

Fred has served several times on the board of directors of the American Society for Indexing, including twice as president.