Randy H. Katz

Randy H. Katz is a pioneering computer scientist whose work has profoundly influenced modern storage systems, high-performance computing and engineering education. He holds an A.B. from Cornell University (1976) and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (1978, 1980).

At Berkeley he joined the faculty in 1983 and was appointed the United Microelectronics Corporation Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences in 1996. Among his signature achievements is his co-development (with David Patterson and Garth Gibson) of the concept of Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), first introduced in 1988 — a foundational advance in fault-tolerant, scalable storage architecture.

In addition to his technical breakthroughs, Katz served as Berkeley’s Vice Chancellor for Research from 2018 to 2021, helping steer the university’s research agenda across disciplines and industry partnerships. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and has published over 350 technical papers and books – including the widely used textbook Contemporary Logic Design, now in multiple editions and adopted in hundreds of universities.

With a career spanning deep research, teaching, institutional leadership and infrastructure innovation, Randy Katz stands among the most influential figures in computing and engineering education.