Dr. Zhuo Li ’05, an electrical and computer engineering former student from Texas A&M University, recently received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Council of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Outstanding Service Award for his hard work and dedication to the EDA community as the 57th annual Design Automation Conference general chair.
Li is a long-time member of IEEE, going all the way back to when he was a doctoral student in Aggieland advised by Dr. Weiping Shi.
“To be honest, I was attracted to the first IEEE membership club event due to the highlight of ‘free pizza,’ but soon I realized that many fellow graduate students were involved in the organization and most of our papers were being published in IEEE-sponsored conferences or journals,” Li said.
As a new member of the student IEEE group at Texas A&M, Li attended several sponsored conferences that gave him the opportunity to meet numerous professors, industry leaders and other students. He began to contemplate how he could one day give back to the community that was helping him grow professionally.
After graduation, Li joined IEEE as a full member and had the opportunity to serve as a technical committee member at workshops, symposiums and conferences. He became a technical reviewer of IEEE journals and later served as sub-committee chair, executive committee member and eventually general chair of Design Automation Conference 2020, which is the premier and largest conference in EDA with over 6,000 virtual attendees that year.
Li has also served IEEE at the local and section level as chair of the IEEE Circuits and Systems/Solid State Circuits-Central Texas Chapter and founding chair of the IEEE Council of Electronic Design Automation chapter. Later, Li served as the secretary and then vice chair of the IEEE Central Texas Section for about five years, managing over 20 chapters in the IEEE Central Texas area. He received the IEEE Region 5 outstanding individual member achievement award twice for his service for the local chapters and sections. He also is a recipient of the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation Early Career Award, and was elevated to IEEE fellow in 2017.
After all the service he’s given to IEEE, Li is more supportive than ever of students getting involved in the organization.
“I definitely encourage Aggies to get involved with the IEEE student organization on campus,” Li said. “It’s a great way to build both your technical skills as well as professional networks. You can help with organizing local events, inviting technical experts from both academia and industry to the chapter events for the talks, interact with other chapters and also enjoy the resources that IEEE provides, such as professional conferences, journal papers and other tech insights such as articles from IEEE Spectrum magazine.
Li is currently a senior group director at Cadence, where he is responsible for many functions across both Genus and Innovus products in their digital and signoff group. This includes synthesis, placement and optimization. He leads an international team located in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, India and China. He received the Cadence Achievement Award and Cadence Master Invention Award in 2018.
In addition to a successful industry career, Li has published over 70 academic papers and his name appears on more than 100 patents.
Li explained how he stays motivated. “I love what I do and that's why I get up every day,” he said. “The work we are doing is critical to mankind as we provide computational software for designing today's electronic systems.”