Anantha P. Chandrakasan

Anantha P. Chandrakasan is the dean of the School of Engineering and Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is chair of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium and MIT AI Hardware Program, and co-chair the MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab, the MIT–Takeda Program, and the MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology. Biography Born in Chennai, India, Chandrakasan moved to the United States during high school. His mother, a biochemist, was a Fulbright Scholar. He received a Bachelor of Science in 1989, a Master of Science in 1990, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences in 1994 from the University of California, Berkeley. Career In 1994, Chandrakasan joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT. He was the Director of the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories from 2006 to 2011, and head of the EECS department from 2011 to 2017. In his role as head of EECS, he launched programs such as a year-long independent research program called “SuperUROP” that supported students doing publication-quality research; an annual event the Rising Stars program that brought together graduate and postdoc women to share advice for advancing academic careers; and an independent activities period (IAP) class called StartMIT that introduces students to entrepreneurship and connects students and postdocs with industrial innovation leaders. In 2017, he was appointed dean of MIT's School of Engineering. His research focuses on the energy efficiency of electronic circuits. Early on in his research career, he worked on low-power chips for portable computers, which helped lead to the development of technology in small, energy-constrained devices like smartphones. His paper titled “Low-power CMOS digital design” published in the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (April 1992) is recognized as one of the most cited papers in the journal.