José Martínez named Associate Director for Cornell ECE

Cornell University's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) is pleased to announce the appointment of Professor José Martínez as associate director.

Martínez will oversee all educational programs in ECE. As associate director he also assigns and evaluates TAs, initiates peer teaching reviews and serves as the representative of ECE for college-level curriculum issues.

While the associate director is involved mainly with the undergraduate curriculum, Martínez will also closely interact with the School’s director, Alyssa Apsel and the new ECE director of graduate studies, Qing Zhao, the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering. 

Martínez takes on the responsibility of associate director from Farhan Rana, the Joseph P. Ripley Professor of Engineering, who will ascend back to being an active member of the school, focusing on his research on semiconductor optoelectronics.

Martínez is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, faculty member of the graduate fields of Computer Science and Systems Engineering, and faculty Fellow of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell. He is part of Cornell’s Computer Systems Laboratory and is currently the hardware theme lead for the Center for Research in Intelligent Storage and Processing in Memory (CRISP). He is also co-founder and part of the Executive Committee of Cornell’s Initiative for Digital Agriculture (CIDA).

Martínez’s research has received a number of awards over the years; among them: two IEEE Micro Top Picks papers (2003 and 2007); a HPCA Best Paper award (2005), as well as MICRO and HPCA Best Paper nominations (2006 and 2015); a NSF CAREER Award (2006); two IBM Faculty Awards (2006 and 2009); and a Distinguished Educator Award (2011) by the University of Illinois’ Computer Science Department (his graduate alma mater).

On the teaching side, he has been recognized with two Kenneth A. Goldman ’71 and one Dorothy and Fred Chau MS ’74 College of Engineering teaching awards (2005, 2014, and 2018, resp.); a Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Teaching Excellence (2015); twice as the Most Influential College Educator of a Merrill Presidential Scholar (2007 and 2016); and as the 2011 Tau Beta Pi Professor of the Year in the College of Engineering.