About Rob A. Rutenbar

Senior Vice Chancellor for Research, University of Pittsburgh
Distinguished Professor, Computer Science, School of Computing and Information
Distinguished Professor, ECE, Swanson School of Engineering
Adjunct Professor, Computer Science, University of Illinois
Adjunct Professor, ECE, Carnegie Mellon University
 

Biography

Rob A. Rutenbar Office Headshot

Rob A. Rutenbar is Senior Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Pittsburgh, a position he has held since 2017. In this role, he leads the University’s strategic vision for research and innovation, works to expand technological and corporate partnerships, and manages all compliance and contract operations. He also holds faculty appointments in Computer Science in the School of Computing and Information, and in Electrical and Computer Engineering, in the Swanson School of Engineering.

He was previously with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he served as Abel Bliss Professor and Head of Computer Science. In this role, he oversaw a department composed of 70 faculty members and nearly 2,500 students that is consistently ranked as the No. 5 Computer Science program in the nation by U.S. News and World Report.

Rutenbar received the PhD from the University of Michigan in 1984, and then joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. He spent 25 years in Electrical and Computer Engineering at CMU, ultimately holding the Stephen J. Jatras (E’47) Chair. He was the founding Director of the Center for Circuit & System Solutions (called “C2S2”), a large consortium of US schools (e.g., CMU, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, Cornell, Columbia, GaTech, UCLA, etc.) supported by DARPA and the US semiconductor industry, focused on design problems at the end of Moore’s Law scaling.  

His research has focused in three broad areas: tools for analog IC design; models for nanoscale statistics for chip design; and hardware architectures for AI. His work has been featured in venues ranging from EETimes to the Economist magazine. He has published over 200 papers and books, and mentored 50+ graduate students.

In 1998 he founded Neolinear, Inc., to commercialize the first practical synthesis tools for analog and mixed signal ICs; he served as Neolinear’s Chief Scientist until its acquisition by Cadence [NSDQ: CDNS] in 2004. In 2006 he founded the Silicon Vox Corporation, now called Voci Technologies Inc., to commercialize high-speed, high-accuracy speech recognition appliances for enterprise voice analytics. Voci was acquired by Medallia [formerly NSDQ: MDLA, now privately held] in 2020.

 

Select Honors

  • 2021 ACM SIGDA Pioneering Achievement Award
  • 2021 Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, and Electrical & Computer Engineering (Pitt)
  • 2019 AAAS Fellow
  • 2019 National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Fellow
  • 2017 Phil Kaufman Award, Electronic System Design (ESD) Alliance and the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA)
  • 2013 Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award, IEEE Transactions on CAD
  • 2011 Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award, IEEE Transactions on CAD
  • 2010 Abel Bliss Professorship in Engineering (Illinois)
  • 2008 ACM Fellow
  • 2008 Wayne State University Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award
  • 2007 IEEE Circuits and Systems Industrial Pioneer Award
  • 2002 Stephen J. Jatras (E’47) Chair in Engineering (CMU)
  • 2002 University of Michigan Alumni Merit Award for Electrical Engineering
  • 2001 Semiconductor Research Corporation Aristotle Award
  • 1998 IEEE Fellow