director Distinguished Professor
Iyer received his Bachelor and Doctor of Philosophy Degrees from the University of Queensland in 1970 and 1977 respectively. He has authored or co-authored close to three hundred refereed publications, graduated over 35 Doctor of Philosophy students and many Masters students.
He is a specialist in reliable and secure networks and systems He then went to Stanford University on a Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation Fellowship. After four years at Stanford, he moved to Illinois.
He holds joint appointments in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Coordinated Science Laboratory (Computer Science Laboratory) and the Department of Computer Science.
He also serves as Director of the Center for Reliable and High-Performance Computing at Illinois and as Chief Scientist of the Information Trust Institute. Previously, he was the Director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory.
He was the Interim Vice-Chancellor for from 2008-2011. He was the institutional lead and is a technical area lead on Illinois’ Blue Waters Petascale project funded by a $200M National Science Foundation grant.
Iyer’s research contributions have led to major advances in the design and validation of dependable computing systems
His students and postdoctoral associates have gone on to successful leadership positions at major industrial laboratories, faculty positions at major universities world-wide and founded several successful startups acquired by major vendors. He has led several large successful projects including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Center for Excellence in Aerospace Computing, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency multi-university program in advanced reliable computing and the creation of the Information Trust Institute. During his tenure as Director of Computer Science Laboratory the research expenditures in the laboratory went from $6.5M to nearly $18M. He currently leads the Trusted Illiac project at Illinois.
Funded by both industry and government, the project is developing adaptive, application-aware architectures supporting a wide range of dependability and security requirements.
He has consulted with and advised major vendors such as International Business Machines Corporation, Himachal Pradesh, Motorola, SUN, Huawei and Infosys Technologies and government agencies like, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Defense , Jet Propulsion Laboratory and National Center for Scientific Research-LAAS. He currently leads the University’s effort to create unique corporate funded offices in India and China.
Iyer is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He has received several awards, including the Humboldt Foundation Senior Distinguished Scientist Award for excellence in research and teaching, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Information Systems Award and Medal for “fundamental and pioneering contributions towards the design, evaluation, and validation of dependable aerospace computing systems,” the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Emanuel R. Piore Award for fundamental contributions to measurement, evaluation, and design of reliable computing systems, and the 2011 Outstanding Contributions award by the Association of Computing Machinery (Association for Computing Machinery (ACM))- Special Interest Group on Security and Audit (SIGSAC) for his fundamental and far-reaching contributions in secure and dependable computing systems Professor Iyer is also the recipient of the degree of Doctor Honaris Causa from France’s Toulouse Sabatier University in recognition of his outstanding research contributions in dependable computing and for his extensive collaboration with National Center for Scientific Research/LAAS in Toulouse.
