Alumnus named senior vice president at HP Labs

Prith Banerjee, dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an alumnus of ECE Illinois, was named senior vice president, research, and director of HP Labs on May 2.  

“It’s a great privilege for me to become director of HP Labs, with its strong reputation for transferring technologies from the lab into the hands of its customers,” Banerjee said in an HP press release. “I’m looking forward to joining a world-class research organization focused on creating exciting new opportunities at HP.”

In his new position, effective August 1, Banerjee will work under the executive vice president and chief strategy and technology officer, Shane Robison, and will be responsible for the research activities in research labs around the world.

Banerjee earned his bachelor’s degree in electronics and electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, India in 1981. He then received his master’s and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Illinois in 1982 and 1984, respectively.

With research interests in VLSI computer aided design, parallel computing, and compilers, Banerjee has made many contributions to the field. In 2000, he founded AccelChip, Inc., a provider of software for building digital-signal processing systems that was sold to Xilinx, Inc., last year. In 2004, he also founded BINACHIP, Inc, a company that produces software to design and use high-performance applications.

Banerjee was the founding director of the computational science and engineering program and a former ECE Illinois professor. He later served as the Walter P. Murphy Professor and chairman of ECE at Northwestern University. Banerjee has served as the UIC dean of engineering since 2004.