New CRA Board Member: Timothy M. Pinkston


CRA welcomes Timothy M. Pinkston as a new Board Member. Pinkston replaces Mark D. Hill as an academic member on the Board. Hill recently moved into industry with a position at Microsoft as Partner Hardware Architect with Azure, requiring him to step down from the Board. We would like to thank Hill for his term of service on the CRA Board.

Timothy M. PinkstonTimothy-Pinkston-headshot
Timothy M. Pinkston is holder of the George Pfleger Chair in Electrical Engineering, former holder of the Louise L. Dunn Endowed Professorship in Engineering, and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). He also is the Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He earned a B.S.E.E. degree from The Ohio State University in 1985, and he earned M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1986 and 1993, respectively.

Prior to joining USC in 1993, he was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories, a Hughes Doctoral Fellow at Hughes Research Laboratory, and a visiting researcher at IBM T. J. Watson Research Laboratory. He founded the SMART Interconnects Group at USC where he conducts research on computer systems architecture. With over a hundred peer-reviewed technical publications, he has made key research contributions to deadlock-free adaptive routing, router microarchitecture and interconnection networks (both distributed and on-chip networks) that achieve high-performance and energy-efficient data movement in multicore and multiprocessor computer systems–from embedded processors to compute servers to large-scale datacenters.

He has received prominent national awards, including the NSF Minority Research Initiation Award and NSF CAREER Award, and is the proud recipient of a Distinguished Alumnus Award from The Ohio State University’s College of Engineering and Minority Engineering Program. He served three years (2005-2008) as an NSF Program Director in the CISE Directorate, serving the last year of his stint as the inaugural Lead Program Director for the newly established Expeditions in Computing Program. He has contributed other significant service to the profession as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), as a member of the Executive Committee of the IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA), and in several key leadership roles and on many technical program committees for top, flagship conferences in the field, including serving as General Co-Chair for the 45th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA’18), Program Chair of the 15th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA’09), and General Chair of the 21st IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS’07). He also co-organizes the CMD-IT Annual Academic Workshop for Underrepresented Ethnic Minorities and Persons with Disabilities and engages in many other efforts to broaden the participation and development of minorities in engineering. Dr. Pinkston is a member of AAAS, Fellow of the ACM, and Fellow of the IEEE.