This year's Kaufman Award recipient is Dr. Mary Jane (Janie) Irwin of Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Irwin is the first woman to receive the Kaufman award, EDA's highest honor.

As this morning's press release says:

Dr. Irwin is being honored for her extensive contributions to EDA through her technical efforts, service to the community and leadership. During her tenure at Pennsylvania State University, she mentored countless students and contributed to technology through her substantial research and numerous publications. Her research included creating EDA tools then using them in computer architecture research, an approach that gave Dr. Irwin influence in both academia and industry.

Janie Irwin has been on the faculty at Penn State since 1977 where she currently holds the title of Emerita Evan Pugh University Professor in Computer Science and Engineering. Prior to her retirement in 2017, she also was the A. Robert Noll Chair in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Her research and teaching interests include computer architecture, energy-aware and reliability-aware systems design, emerging computing technologies, and VLSI systems design and design automation.

Dr. Irwin is known for her contributions in energy-aware systems design and tools––in particular, the development of SimplePower, a cycle-accurate energy estimation tool and its use in designing energy-efficient architectures. Additional contributions include the design and prototyping of VLSI architectures for signal and image processing applications for the discrete wavelet transform. She authored or co-authored more than 200 journal and refereed conference publications and advised more than 25 Ph.D. students. Her research has been supported primarily by the National Science Foundation.

A fellow of IEEE and the ACM, she was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Other honors include IEEE/CAS VLSI Transactions Best Paper of the Year, the Anita Borg Technical Leadership, and the ACM Athena Lecturer awards. Also, the Ten-Year Retrospective Most Influential ASP-DAC Paper, the 25 Years of FPL Most Influential Papers, ACM/SIGDA Pioneering Achievement and the EDAA Lifetime Achievement awards.

Dr Irwin was chair of the DAC in 1999 and a member of the DAC Executive Committee for many years. She was the 2004 recipient of the Marie R. Pistilli Women in EDA, a prestigious annual honor that recognizes individuals who have visibly helped to advance women in electronic design. The award is named for the late Marie R. Pistilli, former organizer of DAC and close friend of Dr Irwin, who valued equality, diversity, and acceptance.

As well, Dr. Irwin and Marie Pistilli co-founded the Workshop for Women in Design Automation, now known as Women in Electronic Design, in 1996.

Among her other professional service activities are the editor-in-chief of ACM’s Transactions on the Design Automation of Electronic Systems and a founding co-editor-in-chief of ACM's Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems. She was an elected member of the Computing Research Association's Board of Directors, of ACM Council and Vice President of ACM.

Dr. Irwin received her Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from Chalmers University in Sweden.

The Kaufman Award

For a history of the Kaufman Award, see my post The Phil Kaufman Award Dinner Is Later this Month. Who Was Phil Kaufman?

For previous honorees that I have written posts about, see:

• Kaufman Award Dinner 2018: The Tom Williams Story
• Rob Rutenbar Is Recipient of 2017 Kaufman Award
• Andrzej Strojwas Receives the 2016 Kaufman Award
• This Year's Phil Kaufman Award Recipient: Wally Rhines

The Kaufman Award Dinner

The Kaufman Award Dinner, at which Dr Irwin will formally receive the award, will take place on November 7th from 6.30pm to 9.30pm (PSA: it always runs late) at The GlassHouse in San Jose (2 South Market Street), hosted by the ESD Alliance and IEEE CEDA. I'm assuming registration for the dinner will soon be on the ESD Alliance website now that the announcement is public.

I will attend the dinner and you can expect a post with a full report a few days later. 

Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.