ECE faculty appointed to named professorships
![photo of professor boltasseva](./purdue-trustees-approve-named-faculty-new-degree-program-posthumous-degree-honor-friends-of-the-university/boltasseva-portrait.jpg)
Two ECE faculty members have been appointed to named professorships. Alexandra Boltasseva was appointed the Ron and Dotty Garvin Tonjes Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Anand Raghunathan was appointed the Silicon Valley Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Boltasseva is a world leader in the fields of nanophotonics, optical metamaterials and plasmonics. She has made groundbreaking contributions in inventing nanophotonic structures with unprecedented performance and demonstrating them with novel materials that were thought as highly unlikely candidates before her work. Boltasseva has earned numerous awards, including being an IEEE Fellow (2020), SPIE Fellow (2017) and OSA Fellow (2015). She received the prestigious MIT TR35 award, given to 35 top innovators under the age of 35 worldwide, across all areas of technology in 2011. In 2014, Boltasseva was elected to the Materials Research Society board of directors. She has co-authored 175 peer-reviewed journal publications. Boltasseva is editor-in-chief for OSA’s Optical Materials Express journal.
![photo of professor raghunathan](./purdue-trustees-approve-named-faculty-new-degree-program-posthumous-degree-honor-friends-of-the-university/anand-portrait.jpg)
Raghunathan is internationally recognized for his work in the field of digital integrated circuits and systems. Over a 25-year period, he has made groundbreaking contributions in low-power electronics, secure embedded systems, hardware for artificial intelligence and brain-inspired computing. He is the associate director of the SRC/DARPA funded Center for Brain-inspired Computing and founding co-director of the Purdue-TSMC Center, leading the next generation of secured Microelectronics ecosystems. He has received the prestigious MIT TR35 award, is an IEEE Fellow and received the IBM and Qualcomm Faculty awards in 2019 and 2020. In addition, he has co-authored 295 peer-reviewed publications and has been awarded 28 U.S. patents (two licensed), 16 international patents and five pending applications.
The Purdue University Board of Trustees ratified the faculty appointments on Friday, August 7.