NSF director to visit campus

Arden L. Bement, director of the National Science Foundation, is due at UC Davis the first week of March to give the inaugural talk in the Chancellor's Colloquia series.

Organizers said Bement's topic is "Innovation: An Old American Virtue, a New American Imperative." The talk is scheduled for 11 a.m. March 5 in the new Conference Center Ballroom, at the campus's south entry. People planning to attend are asked to arrange reservations by e-mail to eventrsvp@ucdavis.edu.

During his daylong visit to UC Davis, Bement is scheduled to tour such facilities as the MIND Institute and the NSF-funded Center for Biophotonics, and meet with campus leadership and with faculty whose research or teaching is supported through NSF programs and grants.

Bement heads the only federal agency that funds research and education in all fields of science and engineering, with an annual budget of more than $6 billion. He was confirmed as director in 2004. Before joining the NSF, he was director of the National Institute for Standards and Technology.

New date for engineering lecture

The College of Engineering announced a new date for a Hewlett-Packard research executive’s appearance in the Dean’s Distinguished Lecture Series.

Prith Banerjee had been scheduled to give his lecture this week. But his talk, “Future Research Directions at HP Labs.,” has been postponed until March 4.

The lecture, free and open to the public, is set for 4 p.m. in 1065 Kemper Hall.

Banerjee is HP’s senior vice president of research and director of HP Labs, the company’s central research unit, with seven locations worldwide.

Before joining HP, Banerjee was dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he led about 115 faculty members in six departments, with 1,550 undergraduate and 900 graduate students, and $21 million in annual research funding.

He is the founder, chairman and chief scientist of BINACHIP Inc., a developer of products and services in electronic design automation.

Previously, he was the Walter P. Murphy Professor and chairman of electrical and computer engineering at Northwestern University, where he also was the director of the Center for Parallel and Distributed Computing. Prior to that, he was the director of the Computational Science and Engineering program and professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In 2000, Banerjee founded AccelChip Inc., a developer of products and services for electronic design automation. Xilinx Inc. purchased the company in 2006.

Banerjee’s research interests are in very large scale integration computer-aided design, parallel computing and compilers.

He is the author of about 300 research papers in these areas, as well as the book, Parallel Algorithms for VLSI CAD.

He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery , and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

He received the American Society for Engineering Education’s Terman Award in 1996 and the National Science Foundation’s Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1987.

Banerjee has served on the technical advisory boards of such companies as Ambit Design Systems, Atrenta and Calypto Design Systems.

He received a bachelor’s degree in electronics and electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and a Master of Science and doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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