A computer architect who wants to redesign the machine from scratch

For much of Onur Mutlu’s career one question has driven his research: what if computers were designed differently from the ground up? An internationally recognised computer architect, he joins NYU Tandon with appointments in electrical and computer engineering and in computer science and engineering, and plans a new centre on emerging computing technologies and systems design.

He has been at ETH Zurich since 2016, where he built a group of more than 40 people, and will bring more than 10 students and researchers to New York while keeping a link to ETH during the transition. Earlier he taught at Carnegie Mellon, founded the computer-architecture group at Microsoft Research and spent time at Intel, AMD, VMware and Google. His undergraduate degree combined computer engineering and psychology, and he sees promise where computing meets the social sciences and humanities. His stated goal for the centre is “great research, education, and entrepreneurship”.