Dr. Derek Chiou is a professor and holds the Temple Foundation Endowed Teaching Fellowship in Engineering #2 in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.

He received his Ph.D., S.M. and S.B. degrees from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There he was a member of the Computation Structures Group within the Laboratory of Computer Science(now combined with the former Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to form CSAIL.) His Ph.D. advisors were Professor Arvind and Dr. Larry Rudolph. His research interests at MIT were computer architecture, parallel system architecture, simulation, parallel run-time systems and compilers. He was an architect of the StarT-Voyager machine as well as the StarT-NG machine. His is currently a research affilate of CSAIL.

After completing his Ph.D., Dr. Chiou became a system architect at Avici Systems, a company that designs high-end, scalable core routers. His responsibilities there included overall system architecture, component architecture including our proprietary scalable switch fabric, fabric interface chips and traffic managers and leading all of Avici's architectural simulation efforts. He was a member of the Board of Directors of Dharmacon, a company that produces siRNA and custom RNA oligos, until the company was acquired by Fisher Scientific in May, 2004. He developed their original database system that managed Dharmacon's operations from synthesis and quality assurance to quote generation, shipping/invoicing and customer service.