William Robinson, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer engineering, has been selected as one of 40 honorees for Florida A&M University’s inaugural Young Alumni Awards. He will attend the 40/40 Celebration, a special event that will take place Oct. 29 during the university’s homecoming weekend.
This new award goes to alumni who are 40 years of age or younger and who have achieved significant career advancement in their professional fields.
Robinson received his B.S. in electrical engineering from the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 1996 and his M.S. in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1998. He received his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Georgia Tech in 2003. Robinson joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Vanderbilt University as an Assistant Professor in 2003, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2010.
He is a member of the Radiation Effects and Reliability (RER) research group and collaborates with both the Institute for Space and Defense Electronics (ISDE) and the Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) at Vanderbilt University. He also participates with the Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology (TRUST) where he serves as the Outreach Director.
His research explores the hardware and software tradeoffs to improve system performance, system reliability, and system security. Topics of interest include computer architecture design, integrated circuit (IC) design, rapid prototyping using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), secure hardware platform design, radiation-hardening-by-design for digital circuitry, and mitigation of single event effects.
Robinson’s major honors include a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and selection for DARPA’s Computer Science Study Panel. He was also a recipient of a Career Initiation Grant from the Facilitating Academic Careers in Engineering and Science (FACES) Program at Georgia Tech.
Robinson is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and participates in the Computer Society, the Education Society, and the Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society. He is also a senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and participates in the Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture. Other professional memberships include the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) and the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE).