Maciej J. Ciesielski, professor of electrical and computer engineering and associate head of the department, has been elected as a 2020 Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). A fellow is the highest grade of membership in the IEEE and is afforded annually to less than 0.1% of the more than 423,000 voting members in more than 160 countries.
According to the IEEE, “Recognizing the achievements of its members is an important part of the mission of the IEEE. Each year, following a rigorous evaluation procedure, the IEEE Fellow Committee recommends a select group of recipients for elevation to IEEE Fellow.” Ciesielski’s elevation to fellow by the IEEE Board of Directors took effect on Jan. 1, 2020.
Ciesielski joined UMass Amherst in 1987. He teaches and conducts research in the area of electronic design automation, and specifically in synthesis, simulation, and formal verification of VLSI circuits and systems. In 2008, he received a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Université de Bretagne Sud in Lorient, France, for contributions to the development of EDA tools for high-level synthesis.
In September 2017, Ciesielski was invited to meet the president of Poland, Mr. Andrej Duda, as part of a “round table” with a selected group of 20-25 prominent scientists of Polish origin now working in the scientific community of the United States.
During the summer of 2017, Ciesielski and his former graduate student Cunxi Yu won the 2017 Hardware Security Contest (HACK@DAC) at the Design Automation Conference, the world’s number one conference in the area of electronic design automation. Ciesielski and Yu’s winning paper introduced “Countermeasures Against Timing Side-Channel Attack of Integrated Circuits,” using EDA techniques.
Ciesielski received his M.S. in electrical engineering from Warsaw Technical University, Poland, in 1974, and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Rochester in 1983. From 1983-86 he worked at GTE Laboratories on the SILC silicon compiler project.