Jan 20 2012
The College of Engineering at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) is proud to announce the elevation of three of its faculty members to the rank of Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred upon a person with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement.
The newly elected IEEE Fellows from UCSB are:
- Divyakant Agrawal, professor of Computer Science
- Kaustav Banerjee, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
- Chris Van de Walle, professor of Materials
In particular, Kaustav Banerjee, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been honored for contributions to modeling and design of nanoscale integrated circuit interconnects.
Kaustav Banerjee, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCSB.
Banerjee is being recognized as an IEEE Fellow by his peers in just his first decade of academia. His research has been fundamental to comprehending the complex nature of nanoscale interconnection structures that link billions of transistors and central to improving the performance, energy-efficiency and reliability of modern microelectronic chips including multi-core microprocessors and network-on-chip designs. Banerjee's seminal works quantifying the benefits of 3-D ICs in mitigating interconnect related problems and highlighting their unique advantages for heterogeneous integration of disparate materials (such as Si and III-V) and technologies (e.g. logic, memory, RF, MEMS, Optoelectronics) have triggered wide-scale proliferation of this technology. Banerjee is also a recognized thought leader in graphene-based next-generation green electronics. His work brought carbon-nanomaterials for ultra-low-power interconnects and low-loss passives to the forefront of emerging technologies in the semiconductor industry.
Banerjee is the Director of the Nanoelectronics Research Lab at UCSB, and an affiliated faculty member with the California NanoSystems Institute and the Institute for Energy Efficiency. He joined the faculty at UCSB in 2002. Banerjee received a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley.
“I am proud to congratulate our faculty for this distinctive honor bestowed by IEEE," said Rod Alferness, Dean of the UCSB College of Engineering. Alferness served as President of the IEEE Photonics Society and received the 2005 IEEE Photonics Award. "IEEE represents the world's most distinguished engineering, computing, and technology professionals. The achievements of Professors Agrawal, Banerjee, and Van de Walle reinforce the standard of excellence among our Engineering faculty."
"The announcement that three UCSB faculty have been appointed Fellows of the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers is wonderful news and further evidence of the strength of UCSB's Engineering programs. I congratulate them and the College of Engineering for this much deserved recognition,” said David Auston, Executive Director of the Institute for Energy Efficiency and Center for Energy Efficient Materials at UCSB.