Dean, School of Engineering

Biography

Anantha P. Chandrakasan is MIT's chief innovation and strategy officer, dean of the School of Engineering, and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He serves as chair of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium and the MIT AI Hardware Program, as well as co-chair of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the MIT-Takeda Program, and the MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology.

He earned his bachelor’s (1989), master’s (1990), and doctoral (1994) degrees in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the MIT faculty in 1994 and was the director of the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories from 2006 to 2011. He was appointed head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) in July 2011, a position that concluded with his appointment as dean in July 2017.

During his six-year tenure as head of MIT’s largest academic department, Chandrakasan spearheaded a number of initiatives that enabled students, postdocs, and faculty to conduct research, explore entrepreneurial projects, and engage with EECS. For students, one of these included the Advanced Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, known as SuperUROP, a yearlong independent research program that provides tools for students to do publication-quality research. It was launched in EECS in 2012 and expanded to the whole School of Engineering in 2015.

In addition, Chandrakasan is committed to advancing diversity and the enhancement of the student experience. While at the helm of EECS, he created the Rising Stars program, an annual event that convenes graduate and postdoctoral women for the purpose of sharing advice about the early stages of an academic career. He also created Start6, which expanded to StartMIT, an Independent Activities Period class, and provides students and postdocs the opportunity to learn from and interact with industrial innovation leaders.

Chandrakasan also leads the MIT Energy-Efficient Circuits and Systems Group, whose research projects have addressed security hardware, energy harvesting, and wireless charging for the internet of things; energy-efficient circuits and systems for multimedia processing; and platforms for ultra-low-power biomedical electronics.

He is a co-author of Low Power Digital CMOS Design (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), Digital Integrated Circuits (Pearson Prentice-Hall, 2nd edition, 2003), and Sub-threshold Design for Ultra-Low Power Systems (Springer, 2006). He was also recognized as the author with the highest number of publications in the 60-year history of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Solid-State Circuits Conference.

Chandrakasan is the recipient of the 2019 Solid-State Circuit Society’s Distinguished Service Award, the 2013 IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits, the 2009 Semiconductor Industry Association University Researcher Award, an honorary doctorate from KU Leuven in 2016, and the 2017 UC Berkeley EE Distinguished Alumni Award. He is also the recipient of the 2022 IEEE Mildred Dresselhaus Medal.

A fellow of the IEEE, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2015, elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019, and elected as fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2020.

Chandrakasan currently serves on the board of Analog Devices Inc. and the SMART Governing Board.