Rowe Receives Siewiorek Professorship

When Dan Siewiorek was hired by Carnegie Mellon University in 1971, his joint appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the School of Computer Science is what appealed to him.

“I was cautioned against joint appointments,” said Siewiorek. “But a joint appointment was appealing to me, because engineers tend to think bottom-up and computer scientists tend to think top-down. Sometimes top-down thinking is the best way to solve a problem, other times bottom-up, and you could recruit from both bases.”

Forty-eight years later, Siewiorek is currently the Buhl University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science and has had a great impact on both his field and Carnegie Mellon.

As a nod to his interdisciplinary career, Siewiorek and his wife have pledged to create the Daniel and Karon Walker Siewiorek Endowed Distinguished Professorship in the College of Engineering for a senior faculty member with a primary appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a joint or courtesy appointment in the School of Computer Science.

“The interdisciplinary nature of Carnegie Mellon is what attracted me to stay in academia,” said Siewiorek. “If it weren’t for Carnegie Mellon, I’d be in industry. I hope this professorship will inspire faculty to nurture a career in both fields.”

Anthony Rowe, named the inaugural recipient of the professorship, has been inspired by Siewiorek’s dedication to electrical and computer engineering and computer science.

“I’m very honored and deeply humbled to receive the Siewiorek Professorship,” said Rowe. “The professorship takes on extra meaning, as Dan has been a great mentor to me throughout my time at Carnegie Mellon. His pioneering work across multiple fields embodies the interdisciplinary ethos of CMU, and has inspired me to collaborate with a diverse range of disciplines across the university.”

A Taylor L. Booth Education Award recipient, Siewiorek has authored nine textbooks and over 475 papers. He has designed or been involved with the design of nine multiprocessor systems and has been a key contributor to the dependability design of over two dozen commercial computing systems.  

Siewiorek is the former Director of the Quality of Life Technology NSF Engineering Research Center, and previously served as Director of the Engineering Design Research Center and co-founder of its successor organization, the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems. He also served as Department Head of the Human Computer Interaction Institute, Chairman of the IEEE Technical Committee on Fault-Tolerant Computing and as founding Chairman of the IEEE Technical Committee on Wearable Information Systems.

A Fellow of IEEE, ACM, and AAAS, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, Siewiorek has been the recipient of the AAEE Terman Award, the IEEE/ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award, and the ACM SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contributions Award.

“I only have 400 more papers to write and 70 or so Ph.D. students to graduate to catch up with him,” said Rowe.