Short Biography of Randy H. Katz

Randy Howard Katz received his undergraduate degree from Cornell University (1976), and his M.S. (1978) and Ph.D. (1980) degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. After a year in industry and two years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he joined the Berkeley faculty in 1983. Since 1996 he has been the United Microelectronics Corporation Distinguished Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is a Fellow of the ACM, the IEEE, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2007, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki, and in 2011, the Public Service Medal (Pingat Bakti Masyarakat), presented by the President of Singapore. He has published over 300 refereed technical papers, book chapters, and books. His textbook, Contemporary Logic Design, has sold over 100,000 copies in two editions, and has been used at over 200 colleges and universities. He has supervised 53 M.S. theses and 43 Ph.D. dissertations (including one ACM Dissertation Award winner and ten women). He has received sixteen best paper awards, including the triple "test of time" RAID paper and one paper selected for a 50 year retrospective on IEEE Communications publications), and three best presentation awards. His academic recognitions include the CS Division's Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Jim and Donna Gray Faculty Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the Berkeley Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award, the ASEE Frederic E. Terman Award, the IEEE James H. Mulligan Jr. Education Medal, the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, the IEEE Reynolds Johnson Information Storage Award, the ACM Sigmobile Outstanding Contributor Award, the Outstanding Alumni Award of the Computer Science Division, the CRA Outstanding Service Award, and the Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Decoration. In the late 1980s, with colleagues at Berkeley, he developed Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), a $15 billion per year industry sector. On secondment to DARPA in 1993-1994, he established whitehouse.gov and connected the White House to the Internet. His current research interests are data analytics (AmpLab), Smart Grid (LoCal), and Software-Defined Buildings (SDB). Prior research interests have included: database management, VLSI CAD, high performance multiprocessor (Snoop cache coherency protocols) and storage (RAID) architectures, transport (Snoop TCP) and mobility protocols spanning heterogeneous wireless networks (BARWAN), converged data and telephony network and service architectures (ICEBERG, SAHARA), and the architecture and energy efficient design of large-scale Internet Datacenters.