Robert J. McMillen earned a BSEE, MSEE and a PhD from Purdue ECE in 1978, 1980, and 1982. He is a distinguished retired computer architect, renowned for his extensive contributions to the field of computer technology over the course of 38 years. With more than 30 patents and numerous publications to his name, McMillen has been instrumental in the development of innovative products across various applications, including database hardware and software, network security, and personal genomics.

McMillen was privileged to turn the research innovations in his Purdue Ph.D. dissertation into reality at Teradata/NCR in the form of the BYNETä interconnection network, a differentiating subsystem of the WorldMark database computers still operating today. He was awarded status as an NCR Fellow for this work.

The second highlight of McMillen’s career was cofounding Edico Genome. He led the early-stage engineering that created the DRAGENä, a hyper-fast genomic data processor. Its ability to extract genetic variants from whole human genomes 1000x faster than a supercomputer garnered two Guiness Book of Records citations. Edico Genome was acquired by Illumina who just released DRAGENä 4.0.