UW-Madison: Computer scientist named to national engineering academy

CONTACT: Guri Sohi, sohi@cs.wisc.edu

MADISON – A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor is among 65 engineers and nine foreign associates elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 2009. Gurindar (Guri) Sohi, John P. Morgridge professor and E. David Cronon professor of computer sciences, has been ranked among the most distinguished engineers in the nation, peer-elected for their exceptional contributions to engineering research, practice or education.

Sohi joined the UW-Madison faculty in 1985 after receiving his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois. At UW-Madison, he holds appointments in both the computer sciences department, which he chaired from 2004 to 2008, and the electrical and computer engineering department.

His research on high-performance computer system design has led to papers and patents that have influenced both research and commercial microprocessors. In 1987, he published a processor model that has served as the basis for many commercial microprocessors designed and built since the mid-1990s. Since then, his research group has made many innovative contributions that have influenced the design of commercial microprocessors. The NAE honors his contributions to the design of high-performance, superscalar computer architectures through his election to the Academy.

“I am proud to be a faculty member at Wisconsin, whose environment allowed me to carry out the work for which this recognition is being given,” Sohi says.

In addition to NAE, Sohi is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE. He received the 1999 ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes award for seminal contributions in the areas of high issue rate processors and instruction level parallelism.

Founded in 1964, the NAE is a branch of the National Academies, which also include the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council. In addition to its role as advisor to the federal government, the NAE conducts independent studies to examine important topics in engineering and technology.