Brown University professor honored for outstanding technical contributions in energy efficient and reliable electronic systems, nanoelectronics, and nanotechnology.
R. Iris Bahar, Brown Professor of Engineering and Computer Science, has been selected the 2019 recipient of the Marie R. Pistilli Women in Electronic Design Award, a prestigious annual honor that recognizes individuals who have significantly helped to advance women in electronic design. The award is named for the late Marie R. Pistilli, former co-founder of Design Automation Conference, who placed a high value on equality, diversity, and acceptance.
Bahar's outstanding technical contributions have been in the area of energy efficient and reliable electronic system design, from high-performance systems, to embedded multicore and nanoelectronic systems. Her contributions are as impactful as they are diverse, from her early work on efficient representations for logic synthesis using algebraic decision diagrams, to being one of the pioneers in identifying power consumption as the premier constraint for computer architects and system designers, and the more recent work on approximate computing and energy efficient and reliable design using nanoelectronics and emerging technologies.
Bahar's work is included in more than 170 papers published in peer reviewed venues and thousands of citations for her published work. Her research has been continuously funded since 1997 through various industrial and government sources, including the National Science Foundation, DARPA, DoD, SRC, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, and NASA.
In response to the award, Diana Marculescu, David Edward Schramm Professor and past Marie R. Pistilli award recipient, said, "Iris has walked and bridged the boundary between electronic design and computer architecture and has become a leader in both fields. Given Iris' technical contributions to the field of EDA and her dedication to the goal of advancing the status of women in electronic design, I cannot think of a more deserving recipient for the 2019 Marie R. Pistilli Women in Electronic Design Achievement Award."
While Iris' work has left an indelible mark on the industry, her educational legacy also includes her work with her students, advisees, and mentees. Iris' contributions to advance the status and representation of women in electronic design has no boundaries. She has been a leader in events that promote and advance the participation of women in electronic design and computer architecture. She has co-organized (with Margaret Martonosi of Princeton University and past Marie Pistilli award recipient) the CRA-W/CDC Discipline- Specific Computer Architecture Summer Workshop series, the first in a series of workshops supported by the Computing Research Association that enable women and underrepresented minorities advance in computing disciplines. She has continued to organize and participate in similar events that promote diversity in computing (from high school girls, to mid-career professionals) over the past several years. Recently, she served on the Executive Committees of ACM SIGDA, and the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD) and as General Chair of the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS).
Iris received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and her Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Before entering the Ph.D. program at CU-Boulder, she worked at Digital Equipment Corporation as a senior hardware designer, responsible for parts of the circuit and microarchitectural implementation in one of their processor chips. She has been on the faculty at Brown University in the School of Engineering since 1996 and is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM.
The Marie R. Pistilli Women in Electronic Design Award will be presented during the 56th DAC General Session Awards presentation on Monday, June 3, 2019 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada.