André DeHon, professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE) and Computer and Information Science (CIS) at the University of Pennsylvania, is the inaugural recipient of the Boileau Professor of Electrical Engineering. He is an alumnus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Prof. DeHon is the founding chair of Penn’s Computer Engineering (CMPE) program and the founding director of the CyberSavvy Research Center, a nationwide security initiative sponsored by DARPA. He also serves as chair of the ACM/SIGDA Technical Committee on FPGAs and Reconfigurable Computing. Prof. DeHon is a leading researcher in computer engineering, having established a strong foundation in engineering science for both reconfigurable computing and computer security. His lab delves into how computations can be physically implemented through software and hardware co-design. Prof. DeHon’s work focuses on designing adaptable, resilient, and efficient hardware architectures that can be dynamically reprogrammed to accommodate various computational tasks, alongside developing tools to support these architectures. His research emphasizes reconfigurable computing, FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) architectures, interconnects, and aspects such as security, reliability, energy efficiency, and performance.
Highlights of his numerous awards and recognitions include his appointment
as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Institute
of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He also earned recognition
as one of Technology Review’s 100 Young Innovators, received the IEEE
Computer Society Mary Kenneth Keller Computer Science and Engineering
Undergraduate Teaching Award, received the Okawa Foundation Award, and has
9 papers recognized in the ACM/TCFPGA Hall of Fame.
The Boileau Professorship of Electrical Engineering was generously established by the late Oliver C. Boileau, Jr. (EE'51, GEE'53), and his wife Nan Eleze Boileau, who passed away in 2023. Oliver Boileau was a Penn alumnus, having earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Penn Engineering. A retired senior aerospace executive, Boileau was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 1979, for “contributions to the technical and cost management of major aerospace programs and to national defense.” He received the D. Robert Yarnall Award from the Penn Engineering Alumni Society in 2001. The Boileaus also named the Boileau Laboratory on the fifth floor of Penn Engineering’s Levine Hall.
