The department's first female IEEE Fellow, Professor Lizy John, was elevated for contributions to power modeling and performance evaluation of microprocessors. Dr. John has concentrated on allowing microprocessor designers to find problems early in the design process. Since pre-silicon microprocessors cannot be tested with full applications, Dr. John’s team developed a cloning technique to create miniature versions enabling an accurate estimation of performance and power. Dr. John's team has also worked on creating power and thermal stress programs (aka power viruses) to drive designs to extreme conditions and help design robust microprocessors and computer systems.

Another application of the cloning technique from John's group has been to hide the functionality of proprietary applications. Lockheed Martin is supporting John's research to create clones for their proprietary codes, enabling them to share codes without divulging proprietary information.