Prof. David Z. Pan was named the recipient of the UCLA Samueli Professional Achievement in Academia Award this month. Each year, the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering honors alumni, faculty, students and other engineering leaders for outstanding achievements in their fields.

David Pan is a UCLA alum and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He has made transformative contributions to electronic design automation, including AI-driven methods, physical design and design for manufacturing. He led the development of DREAMPlace, an open-source AI-accelerated tool used in industry to design advanced graphics and AI processors, expediting chip placement by as much as 40 times. He also developed MAGICAL, an open-source system that uses AI-assisted methods to automate analog integrated-circuit layout.

With 10 U.S. patents, Pan has authored more than 550 technical papers and received more than 20 best paper awards from electronic design automation and AI conferences. He is an editor of top publications in the field, a startup co-founder and an advisor to Google X, DeepMind and other organizations. He has also served on national and international technology review and advisory boards, professional societies and conference committees.

Pan is a recipient of the Semiconductor Research Corporation Technical Excellence Award, an NVIDIA Research Faculty Fellow and a Design Automation Conference Top 10 Author. He is also a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. In 2009, UCLA Samueli recognized his early-career achievements with its Rising Professional Achievement Award.

He holds the Silicon Laboratories Endowed Chair in Electrical Engineering at UT Austin and has advised more than 60 doctoral students and postdocs, many of whom now hold academic appointments and industry leadership positions worldwide.

Pan holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Peking University in China and three advanced degrees from UCLA — a master’s in atmospheric sciences and a master’s and doctorate in computer science.