Prof. Ken Shepard Named Lau Family Professor of Electrical Engineering

Prof. Kenneth L. Shepard has been named the Lau Family Professor of Electrical Engineering. Ken holds joint appointments as professor of biomedical engineering and of electrical engineering. He is a pioneer in development of systems and applications based on heterogeneously integrating new devices and materials with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology. As part of these efforts, Shepard's research team at Columbia has developed many new techniques for interfacing CMOS integrated circuits with biological systems for applications ranging from molecular diagnostics to neural interfaces. Over the years, Prof. Shepard's group has made contributions to many fields including computer-aided design, VLSI systems, power electronics, carbon-based materials and applications, biophysics, and neuroscience. In 1997, Shepard cofounded CadMOS Design Technologies, which was acquired by Cadence Design Systems in 2001. In 2012, he cofounded Ferric, which is commercializing new approaches for integrated voltage conversion. Shepard received his BSE from Princeton University, and MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford. Prior to joining the faculty at Columbia, he was with the VLSI Design Department at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, where he played a leadership role in IBM's very successful migration of the mainframe processors to CMOS. He has been on the faculty at Columbia Engineering since 1997.

Lee and Margaret Lau established the Lau Family endowed chair to support research and teaching at the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. Mr. Lau is a partner and cofounder of Alignvest, a leading international alternative investment management firm based in Toronto, Canada. He founded ATI Technologies in 1985, building the company into the world's largest supplier of graphics chips and add-in boards to the personal computer industry. In addition to managing the company, he was ATI's largest shareholder, first employee, and responsible for innovation and development of all products. Since then, Lau has managed his family office investing in a variety of alternative asset products. Prior to founding ATI, Lau held various design engineering positions with Mitel, Motorola, and Plessey. Lau holds a master's degree in engineering and a BASc from the University of Toronto.