Tarek El-Ghazawi, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS), has been awarded a Humboldt Research Award, a prestigious international research award given by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Bonn, Germany, for excellence in his field.
The award is given in recognition of a researcher's entire achievements to date, to scholars whose fundamental discoveries, new theories or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future.
David Dolling, dean of SEAS, said Dr. El-Ghazawi’s work is exceptional.
“Tarek El-Ghazawi is an internationally recognized leader in the field of high-performance computing, and I’m delighted that he has received this well-deserved honor,” Dr. Dolling said. “As a result of his leadership, the George Washington University’s high-performance computing research program is among the nation’s strongest. Dr. El-Ghazawi’s labs produce top-notch research, and they provide a tremendous launching pad for our students in this field.”
The Humboldt Research Award is made every year to 100 scientists across the world in all disciplines, and comes with a cash award of €60,000—about $80,000—plus the opportunity to work with German researchers.
Dr. El-Ghazawi said he will be collaborating with Juergen Becker, head of the Institut für Technik der Informationsverarbeitung (ITIV Institute) at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and his team. Dr. Becker is one of the world’s authorities in embedded systems and reconfigurable computing, and his team is considered at the forefront of the field, Dr. El-Ghazawi said.
“Our collaboration will target synergistic intersections of our interests aiming at improving performance, power consumption and usability of large scale high-performance computing systems as well as small embedded computer devices used for control through intelligent hardware-software co-design,” he said.
Dr. Becker said he was excited to begin their collaboration.
“Dr. El-Ghazawi is a renowned scientist who has made pioneering contributions to the areas of high-performance reconfigurable computing systems and the Partitioned Global Address Space programming models,” he said. “We look forward to working with him and to building a sustainable scientific cooperation between KIT and GW.”
Dr. El-Ghazawi directs GW’s strategic excellence program in high-performance computing and founded the National Science Foundation Industry-University Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing at GW. He was selected as an IEEE fellow for his scientific contributions, was a recipient of the Alexander Schwarzkopf Award for Technological Innovation in 2012 and was also selected as an IBM faculty research fellow.