Zhiru Zhang wins UCLA Rising Professional Achievement Award

ECE Assistant Professor Zhiru Zhang recently received the Rising Professional Achievement Award from UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. Presented to one alumnus annually, the Rising Professional Achievement Award honors the early career achievements of alumni under the age of 40. The school seeks candidates with impactful accomplishments in academia, industry or entrepreneurship; contributions to the engineering profession; a demonstrated commitment to mentorship; and notable service to the community and the profession.

Zhang is an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University and a member of the Computer Systems Laboratory. His current research focuses on high-level design automation for heterogeneous computing. More concretely, his recent publications focus on the topics of high-level synthesis, architecture and compiler optimization for hardware specialization, and software-defined reconfigurable systems.

His research has been recognized with a DARPA Young Faculty Award (2015), the IEEE CEDA Ernest S. Kuh Early Career Award (2015), an NSF CAREER Award (2015), the Ross Freeman Award for Technical Innovation from Xilinx (2012), a Best Paper Award from the ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (2012). On the teaching side, he received the Michael Tien'72 Excellence in Teaching Award (2016), which is the highest recognition for teaching awarded by the Cornell Engineering.

Prior to joining Cornell, Dr. Zhang co-founded AutoESL Design Technologies, Inc. to commercialize his PhD research on high-level synthesis. AutoESL was later acquired by Xilinx and the AutoESL tool was rebranded as Vivado HLS after the acquisition. Vivado HLS is now available to thousands of FPGA designers worldwide, becoming the first mainstream and currently the most widely deployed C-based design tool for FPGAs.