Professor Jason Cong, Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence at UCLA, received the Harold Pender Award from the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania “for groundbreaking contributions in field-programmable gate arrays and electronic design automation.”
Established in 1972, the Pender Award is the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering’s highest honor and is named for Harold Pender, the founding Dean of Penn’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering. Pender led the school during the development and debut of ENIAC in 1945. As part of the award, Professor Cong delivered the Pender Lecture, titled “Efficient General Intelligence with Novel Models and Customized Silicon Co-Design.”
Past recipients include highly distinguished figures in engineering and computer science, ranging from leading researchers such as Shafi Goldwasser, Yann LeCun, Barbara Liskov, Robert Kahn, and Vinton Cerf, to pioneering innovators like Claude Shannon, Robert Noyce, and Jack Kilby.
Cong received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UIUC in 1990. He directs the Center for Domain-Specific Computing and the VAST Laboratory at UCLA. A leading researcher in VLSI as well as quantum computing, he is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and NAI. He has received top honors including the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal, ACM Chuck Thacker Breakthrough Award, and co-founded successful startups such as AutoESL (acquired by Xilinx) and Falcon Computing (acquired by AMD).