Professional Biography
Dirk Stroobandt

Dirk Stroobandt was born in Gent, Belgium, in 1972. He began his engineering studies in 1989 at Ghent University and graduated in 1994 as electrotechnical engineer at the same university. In May 1998, he obtained the Ph.D. degree in electrotechnical engineering from Ghent University. From October 1994 to September 1998, Dirk Stroobandt was research assistant and from October 1998 to September 2002 he was post-doctoral fellow with the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders (Belgium) (F.W.O.). Since October 2002, he is Professor at Ghent University (promotion to "Hoofddocent" in 2006), affiliated with the Department of Electronics and Information Systems (ELIS), Parallel Information Systems group (PARIS). He currently leads a research group of about 15 people with interests in semi-automatic hardware design methodologies and tools, spiking neural networks and reservoir computing, scalable hardware and applications and reconfigurable multiprocessor networks. The research interests of the group can be found here).

Dirk Stroobandt is a member of AIG (Alumni Ghent), KVIV (Royal Flamish Engineering Association), IEEE, and ACM.

Dirk Stroobandt is the inaugural winner of the ACM/SIGDA Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award in Design Automation, presented to him at the Design Automation Conference (DAC'99) in New Orleans, Louisiana, June 1999. He also received the `Scientific prize Alcatel Bell' for his work on "Structural and behavioural aspects of short optical interconnects in electronic systems" in 2002.

Dirk Stroobandt visited the lab of Prof. Fadi J. Kurdahi at the University of California at Irvine from April to July 1997. From July 1999 to June 2000, he visited the group of Prof. Andrew B. Kahng at the Computer Science Department of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) as a post-doctoral researcher.

Dirk Stroobandt initiated and co-organized the International Workshop on System-Level Interconnect Prediction (SLIP) in 1999 (Monterey, April 10-11). He was the General Chair of SLIP 2000 (San Diego, April 8 - 9, 2000) and is still actively involved in this workshop. He is guest editor of two special issues of the IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems on System-Level Interconnect Prediction and a special issue on SLIP for Integration, the VLSI Journal. He is also associate editor of ACM's TODAES