Ulya Karpuzcu appointed as Jim and Sara Anderson Professor
Ulya Karpuzcu was recently appointed as Jim and Sara Anderson Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering. A developmental professorship with a five year term, it supports the department's most outstanding mid-career faculty. Karpuzcu’s research interests span physics of computing, Ising machines, computing-in-memory, intermittent computing, hardware security, reliability, sustainability and energy-efficiency.
"I am grateful for the Jim and Sara Anderson professorship. It provides the much needed seed-funding to enable research on next generation computing technologies."
Career highlights
In 2022, Karpuzcu was elected to serve as the technical program co-chair of the 55th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO). She also served as a member of the steering committee from 2022 to 2025. Although these are service positions, they are also a testament to her research profile. Individuals in this position are typically recognized as thought leaders in research in the computer architecture community.
More recently Karpuzcu’s research focus has shifted to the physics of computing as a result of large scale collaborative projects (funded by NSF and DARPA) that she has been a part of. Technology limitations pose some of the most challenging problems in computing systems research today and her current research direction is considered critical. These problems cannot be tackled without understanding technology-driven bottlenecks as induced by fundamental physical limits. Her most recent research outcomes along these lines have been published in Nature Electronics (“A Coupled Oscillator Based Ising Chip for Combinatorial Optimization”).
Read about its significance.
Teaching highlights
As an instructor, Karpuzcu developed a new graduate/upper-division-undergraduate level course titled Physics of Computing inspired by Richard Feynman’s lectures on computing. It was first offered as an 8000-level course and then as a 5000-level special topics course to attract our most successful undergraduates. In spring 2017, the course became a permanent part of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) curriculum, and it is now offered annually. This is the only introductory course across the College of Science and Engineering on quantum computing which does not require any background on quantum mechanics.
Karpuzcu earned her bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering and computer engineering (double major) from Istanbul Technical University, and her Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She was sponsored by a Fulbright Fellowship for her master’s degree.
Jim Anderson earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and is the CEO of Coherent Corporation.