Carnegie Mellon Names Bob Iannucci To Head Silicon Valley Campus

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Jul 22, 2013, 03:27 ET

PITTSBURGH, July 22, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Carnegie Mellon University's Bob Iannucci has been named associate dean and director of CMU's Silicon Valley campus, effective Sept. 1. He succeeds Martin L. Griss, director of the Disaster Management Initiative and founder and former director of the CyLab Mobility Research Center.

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"I am honored to be named head of CMU's innovative and entrepreneurial campus that sits in the middle of Silicon Valley, the worldwide hub of technology innovation," said Iannucci, a distinguished service professor at CMU-Silicon Valley and director of the CyLab Mobility Research Center with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "CMU's international reputation for research and academic excellence, coupled with the entrepreneurial opportunities here in Silicon Valley, make this campus a truly unique place. I look forward to the challenge and the opportunity."

James H. Garrett, Jr., dean of the College of Engineering and the Thomas Lord Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, praised Iannucci for his extensive experience directing research activity at several internationally recognized companies in Silicon Valley. "His stellar research reputation, and his more recent experience as an interdisciplinary educator and researcher at the CMU Silicon Valley campus, make him ideally suited to be the associate dean and director of the CMU Silicon Valley campus."

Prior to joining CMU, Iannucci served as the chief technology officer of Nokia and head of Nokia Research Center (NRC). There, he spearheaded the effort to transform NRC into an open innovation center, creating "lablets" at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, Tsinghua University, the University of Cambridge and Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL). Under his leadership, NRC's previously established labs and the new lablets delivered fundamental contributions to the worldwide Long Term Evolution for 3G (LTE) standard; created and commercialized Bluetooth Low Energy; created and promulgated what is now the MIPI UniPro interface for high-speed, in-phone networking; and generated many other communications technology innovations.

An entrepreneurial pioneer, Iannucci has led engineering teams at two startups — one focused on virtualized networking and the other on computational fluid dynamics (Exa Corporation, which went public in 2012) — creating systems that offered order-of-magnitude improvements over alternatives. He also served as director of Digital Equipment Corporation's Cambridge Research Laboratory (CRL) and was vice president of research at Compaq. His CRL team (along with CMU's Dan Siewiorek, Asim Smailagic and other researchers from the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems) created MoCCA — a mobile communication and computing architecture that anticipated much of what has become today's smartphone technology.

After receiving a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science in 1988 from MIT, Iannucci led a team at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center that developed highly scalable computing systems.

CMU's Silicon Valley campus, established in 2002 at Moffett Field, offers master's and Ph.D. degree programs in electrical and computer engineering as well as master's degree programs in software engineering, software management and information networking.

The campus also offers a novel entrepreneurship program. Designed to capitalize on the speed of the Internet and tech-based innovations in the broader Silicon Valley economy, the CMU program blends both technical acumen and business problem-solving skills in a rigorous 12-month, full-time program.

About Carnegie Mellon University: Carnegie Mellon (www.cmu.edu) is a private, internationally ranked research university with programs in areas ranging from science, technology and business, to public policy, the humanities and the arts. More than 12,000 students in the university's seven schools and colleges benefit from a small student-to-faculty ratio and an education characterized by its focus on creating and implementing solutions for real problems, interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation. A global university, Carnegie Mellon has campuses in Pittsburgh, Pa., California's Silicon Valley and Qatar, and programs in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and Mexico. The university recently completed "Inspire Innovation: The Campaign for Carnegie Mellon University," exceeding its $1 billion goal to build its endowment, support faculty, students and innovative research, and enhance the physical campus with equipment and facility improvements. The campaign closed June 30, 2013.