Peipei Zhou, assistant professor of engineering at Brown University, has been awarded a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant from the National Science Foundation.
The CAREER program is the federal agency’s most prestigious honor in support of early-career faculty and will provide Zhou with $795,718 over a five-year period. The aim is to support early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
With the rise of complex chiplet-based architectures and AI-assisted hardware design, current programming methods have become increasingly fragmented and prone to error. Zhou’s research focuses on the development of a scalable high-level synthesis and programming framework to streamline the creation of customized AI systems. By leveraging an MLIR-based (multi-level intermediate representation) infrastructure, this framework will enable verified and efficient integration of heterogeneous computing systems across diverse hardware backends, including field programmable gate arrays, graphics processing units, tensor accelerators, processing-in-memory architectures, and application-specific integrated circuits, ensuring that even AI-assisted hardware designs are rigorous, efficient, and “correct-by-construction.”
Beyond the technical innovation, this project serves as a cornerstone for workforce and educational development in microelectronics, computer science, and engineering. Zhou plans to integrate these research milestones into a modular, open-source curriculum reaching a broad spectrum of students, from K-12 participants to university undergraduates and graduate students at Brown. By providing hands-on experience with cutting-edge electronic design automation (EDA) tools, the initiative aims to democratize access to efficient programming and design for heterogeneous, domain-specific computing. Ultimately, this effort will strengthen regional leadership in the Northeast Corridor and bolster U.S. global competitiveness in the vital fields of microelectronics research and training.
Zhou joined Brown Engineering in the fall of 2024 from the University of Pittsburgh. She received her Ph.D. in computer science (2019) and M.S. in electrical and computer engineering (2014) from UCLA, and her B.S. in electrical and computer engineering (2012) from Southeast University, Chien-Shiung Wu Honors College, in China. Her research investigates customized computer architecture, programming abstraction, and EDA for applications including precision medicine in healthcare, and artificial intelligence.
She was honored with the 10-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award at the 2025 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)/Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) for her 2016 paper and its lasting impact. She has presented at top-tier IEEE/ACM computer system and electronic design automation conferences including the Field-Programmable Gate Array conference (FPGA), the Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines conference (FCCM), the Design Automation Conference (DAC), the ICCAD, and the International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS). She has also published in top journals such as Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD), Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems (TRETS), Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES), Transactions on Embedded Computer Systems (TECS), and IEEE Micro. Her work won the 2019 IEEE TCAD Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award. Other awards include the 2025 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays Best Paper Nominee, 2024 ACM/IEEE International Green and Sustainable Computing Best Viewpoint Paper, the 2018 IEEE ISPASS Best Paper Nominee, and the 2018 IEEE/ACM ICCAD Best Paper Nominee.
Zhou joins a group of 20 Brown Engineering faculty who have been awarded grants as part of the CAREER program, including Nora Ayanian (2016), Yuri Bazilevs (2011), Lucas Caretta (2025), Kareen Coulombe (2021), Tejal Desai (2000), Pedro Felzenszwalb (2008), Franklin Goldsmith (2016), Pradeep Guduru (2006), Dan Harris (2024), David Henann (2016), Robert Hurt (1996), Tayhas Palmore (1998), Andrew Peterson (2016), Tom Powers (2001), Sherief Reda (2010), Anita Shukla (2020), Kimani Toussaint (2010), Axel van de Walle (2010), Alex Zaslavsky (1997) and Rashid Zia (2009).