Brief Biography

Dr. William H. Robinson received his B.S. in electrical engineering from the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 1996 and his M.S. in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in 1998. He received his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Georgia Tech in 2003. His dissertation was directed by Dr. D. Scott Wills who co-leads the Embedded Computer Vision and Surveillance Systems (ECVASS) research group (formerly the Portable Image Computation Architectures (PICA) research group).

Since August 2003, Dr. Robinson has served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. He is a member of the Radiation Effects and Reliability (RER) research group and collaborates with both the Institute for Space and Defense Electronics (ISDE) and the Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) at Vanderbilt University. He also participates with the Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology (TRUST) where he serves as the Outreach Director. His research explores the hardware and software tradeoffs to improve system performance, system reliability, and system security. Topics of interest include computer architecture design, integrated circuit (IC) design, rapid prototyping using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), secure hardware platform design, radiation-hardening-by-design for digital circuitry, and mitigation of single event effects. Dr. Robinson’s major honors include a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and selection for DARPA’s Computer Science Study Panel. He was also a recipient of a Career Initiation Grant from the Facilitating Academic Careers in Engineering and Science (FACES) Program at Georgia Tech.

Dr. Robinson is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and participates in the Computer Society, the Education Society, and the Photonics Society. He is also a senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and participates in the Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture. Other professional memberships include the American Society of Engineering Educators (ASEE), the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), and SPIE – The International Society for Optical Engineering.

Dr. Robinson is also the coordinator for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Minority Ph.D. Program in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Vanderbilt University.