Prof. Lizy John of UT ECE was recently honored with a 2011 Outstanding Engineering Alumni Award from Penn State University. A dozen top Penn State engineers were honored on April 21 at the 2011 Outstanding Engineering Alumni Awards ceremony at the Nittany Lion Inn on the University Park campus. The annual Outstanding Engineering Alumni Award is the highest honor conferred by the College and recognizes graduates who have reached exceptional levels of professional achievement. Prof. John received her PhD on computer engineering from Penn State in 1993.

Dr. Lizy Kurian John holds the B. N. Gafford Professorship in Electrical Engineering in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.

She received her Ph.D. in computer engineering from The Pennsylvania State University in 1993. She joined The University of Texas Austin faculty in fall 1996, and is an Engineering Foundation Centennial Teaching Fellow.

Prof. John is an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on VLSI and is in the editorial board of IEEE-Micro. She is a senior member of IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, and a member of ACM, and ACM SIGARCH. She is also a member of Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi and Phi Kappa Phi. She has edited a book on computer performance evaluation and three books on workload characterization. She holds a patent on field programmable memory cell arrays. She has published 10 book chapters, and more than 60 refereed journal and conference publications. She teaches courses on superscalar microprocessors, performance evaluation and benchmarking, computer architecture, and digital design.

Prof. John's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, IBM, Intel, Motorola, AMD, Texas Instruments, Tivoli and Microsoft Corporations. She won the National Science Foundation CAREER award and the Junior Faculty Enhancement Award from Oak Ridge Associated Universities in 1996. She also won the Halliburton Award of Excellence in 1999 and the College of Engineering Foundation Faculty Award in 2001. She was an IBM Austin Center for Advanced Studies fellow from 2001 to 2003. Dr. John was elevated to IEEE Fellow status in 2009.