Pande named interim director of EECS school

By Tina Hilding, Voiland College of Engineering & Architecture

PULLMAN, Wash. – Partha Pande has been named interim director of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University.

A WSU faculty member since 2005, he is the Boeing Centennial Chair in Computer Engineering. He conducts research in network on chip (NoC) technology, which is becoming the state-of-the art communications method for multi-core chips.

He was part of a team of researchers that recently received a $1.2 million National Science Foundation grant to design tiny, wireless data centers that could dramatically reduce energy usage. His research group also led design of a wireless network on a computer chip.

“The School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science plays a crucial role in training graduates in critical, high demand fields for industries in the state and region,” said Don Bender, interim dean of the Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture. “Dr. Pande is a respected scholar, and we appreciate him taking on this new leadership role.”

Behrooz Shirazi, who has served as the school’s director since 2005, will become director of the WSU Community Health Analytics Initiative. The five-year, $4.9 million effort will look at social determinants of antimicrobial resistance in human and animal populations, boosting researchers’ ability to analyze extensive datasets and promoting information-based health care research.

Pande has authored or co-authored more than 100 papers in journals and conference proceedings, which have been cited more than 4,000 times. In 2009 he received a National Science Foundation Career award, and in 2013 he received the Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture’s outstanding researcher award.

He holds a doctoral degree in electrical and computer engineering from University of British Columbia, master’s degree in computer science from National University of Singapore and bachelor’s degree from University of Calcutta, India.