Abbas El Gamal
received his B.Sc. Honors degree in Electrical Engineering from Cairo University in 1972,and his M.S. in Statistics and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1977 and 1978, respectively. From 1978 to 1980, he was an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at USC. He has been on the Stanford faculty since 1981, where he is currently the Hitachi America Professor in the School of Engineering. From 1997 to 2002, he served as the principal investigator on the Stanford Programmable Digital Camera program. From 2004 to 2009, he was the Director of the Information Systems Laboratory. He was a visiting professor and MacKay Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley in Fall 2009-2010, and visited Tsinghua University as member of the Tsinghua Guest Chair Professor Group on Communications and Networking in Spring 2009-2010.
Prof. El Gamal's research contributions have spanned several areas, including network information theory, Field Programmable Gate Array, and digital imaging devices and systems. He has authored or coauthored over 200 papers and holds 30 patents in these areas. Prof. El Gamal is a Fellow of IEEE and has received several honors and awards for his research contributions.
Prof. El Gamal has also played key roles in several Silicon Valley companies. In 1984, he founded the LSI Logic Research Lab, which later became the Consumer Product Division. In 1986, he cofounded Actel, where he served in several capacities, including Chief Scientist. In 1999, he co-founded Silicon Architects, where he was Chief Technical Officer and member of the board of directors until Synopsys acquired it in 1995. He was a Vice President of Synopsys from 1995 to 1997. He co-founded Pixim in 1999 to commercialize the technology developed under the programmable digital camera program. He has also served on the board of directors and advisory boards of several other semiconductor, EDA, and Biotech startups.
