This program provides financial and networking support to faculty members early in their careers who show promise as future academic leaders in disruptive computing technologies. Intel’s goal is to advance the careers of these researchers and to foster long-term relationships with the company’s senior technical leaders. Nine professors were chosen this year from some of the top universities in the United States, including the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell and Princeton.

Bakir received this award based on his proposed project with Intel, titled “Design and Experimental Evaluation of Novel Architecture-Driven Interconnect Technologies for On-Chip, Off-Chip, and Monolithic 3D Integrated Circuits.” His project is meant to address the difference in performance and the waste of energy from data movement relative to computation.

His research group will be exploring the limits and opportunities of architecture-driven interconnect technologies at the on- and off-chip levels in order to improve the integrated circuit performance per unit energy over the current state-of-the-art.

Bakir is also a Georgia Tech alumnus, having received both his M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering in 2000 and 2003, respectively.  He has received various other prestigious awards over the years, including the 2011 IEEE CPMT Society Outstanding Young Engineer Award and the 2012 DARPA Young Faculty Award.