Sanders named ECE ILLINOIS department head

7/7/2014

Professor William H. Sanders is ECE ILLINOIS' new department head, Engineering at Illinois Dean Andreas C. Cangellaris announced Thursday.

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Professor William H Sanders is ECE ILLINOIS’ new department head, Engineering at Illinois Dean Andreas C. Cangellaris announced Thursday. His appointment is effective August 16, 2014.

William H Sanders
William H Sanders

“I know from experience what a challenging and gratifying job it is to be head of the ECE Department, and I know that Bill will do it well,” said Cangellaris. “Bill’s strong vision and work ethic will be a great asset to the department. I look forward to working with him to take ECE to the next level.”

Sanders has served as the department’s interim head since July 2013, when Cangellaris, the former department head, became dean.

“It’s an incredibly exciting time, as we prepare to move into our new building and continue educating some of the very brightest students of their generation,” Sanders said. “I am honored to lead this department, and I am grateful to have the opportunity to do so.”

Sanders, a Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering, previously served as the director of the university’s Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL), a premier, multidisciplinary research lab focused on information technology at the crossroads of computing, control, and communications.

Sanders came to Illinois in 1994 as an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and researcher in CSL. He earned the title of professor in 1998. His research is focused on dependability and security metrics and evaluation, architecting reliable and secure systems, and computer system modeling and analysis.

In 2004, he became the inaugural director of the Information Trust Institute (ITI), which provides national leadership combining research and education with industrial outreach in trustworthy and secure information systems. He is also the principal investigator of the NSF/DOE/DHS Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIP) Center, which is at the forefront of national efforts to make the U.S. power grid smart and resilient. He was also the co-founder of and has been the associate director of the Advanced Digital Sciences Center, Illinois’s research center in Singapore, since its inception in 2009.

Sanders is co-developer of three tools for assessing the performance of systems represented as stochastic activity networks: MetaSAN, UltraSAN, and Möbius. He is also a co-developer of the Loki distributed system fault injector and the AQuA/ITUA middlewares for providing dependability/security to distributed and networked applications, and the NP-View tool for assessing the security of networked systems.

 Sanders holds a PhD in computer science and engineering; an MSE in computer, information, and control engineering; and a BSE in computer engineering, all from the University of Michigan. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). 


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This story was published July 7, 2014.