Professor David Patterson

David Patterson is the Pardee Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. He was the first of his family to graduate from college, and he enjoyed it so much that he didn’t stop until getting his PhD from UCLA in 1976. Dave's research style is to identify critical questions for the IT industry and gather inter-disciplinary groups of faculty and graduate students to answer them. The answer is typically embodied in demonstration systems, and these demonstration systems are later mirrored in commercial products. In addition to research impact, these projects train leaders of our field. The best-known projects were Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC), Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), and Networks of Workstations (NOW). His current research interests are in the parallel computing revolution using via the Parallel Computing Laboratory (Par Lab) and managing big data via the Algorithms-Machines-People Laboratory (AMPlab). A measure of the success of projects is the 30 awards won by Patterson and as his teammates, including election to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences and being named a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, the Computer History Museum, and both AAAS organizations. In his spare time, he coauthored five books, including two with President John Hennessy of Stanford University, and served as Chair of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, Chair of the Computing Research Association, and President of ACM. He has also been active in the Northern California Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, from whom he received a Community Service Award.