Naresh Shanbhag, the Jack S. Kilby Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been named the Director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) in the The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The appointment will be effective July 16, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees.
“He is a distinguished member of our faculty whose leadership, research excellence and long‑standing commitment to interdisciplinary innovation make him well suited to guide CSL into its next chapter,” said Grainger Engineering Dean Rashid Bashir. “His vision for advancing collaborative science, strengthening CSL’s global impact and supporting the success of our research community will be invaluable as we continue to expand the laboratory’s reach and influence.”
A member of Illinois’ faculty since 1995, Shanbhag holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Wright State University in Ohio, and a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota.
Before joining Illinois’ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Shanbhag worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories as the lead chip architect for one of the first very high-speed digital subscriber line (VDSL) transceivers. Upon arriving at Illinois in August 1995, Shanbhag joined CSL, where his initial research focused on understanding and designing integrated circuits (ICs) at the limits of energy efficiency for digital signal processing and broadband communications (VDSL, cable modems, and ATM-LAN).
In 2001, Shanbhag and a former CSL faculty member, Andrew Singer, co-founded Intersymbol Communications, a fabless semiconductor start-up, to create DSP-based mixed-signal ICs for OC-192 (12.5 Gb/s) optical ultra-long-haul links. Shanbhag served as Intersymbol’s CTO until 2007, when it was acquired by Finisar Corp., a leading manufacturer of optical transceivers and components. Finisar, in turn, was acquired by II-VI in 2019 and later renamed to Coherent. Over the past 25 years, Intersymbol (and its succeeding forms) has continued to operate from its office in Champaign, Ill.
From 2013 to 2017, Shanbhag served as the founding Director of the Systems on Nanoscale Information fabriCs (SONIC) Center, which investigated the design of information processing on nanoscale device fabrics based on a statistical Shannon-inspired model of computation. SONIC was funded by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) and DARPA. With 27 faculty and more than 100 graduate students spread across 10 top-tier universities, SONIC established the foundations for energy-efficient computing for the AI era, and became an inspiration for future multi-university semiconductor research centers.
Shanbhag has received the 2024 SRC Innovation Award for the first patent on SRAM-based in-memory computing, the 2018 SIA/SRC University Researcher Award for advancing semiconductor research, and multiple best paper awards, and was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 2006.
“My career accomplishments are a direct result of being part of the CSL community — collaborating with its outstanding faculty, staff, and students, and embracing its culture of excellence and scholarship from the very first day of my academic journey. It is a true honor and privilege to now have the opportunity to serve this remarkable community as its Director,” said Shanbhag.
Shanbhag succeeds previous CSL Director Klara Nahrstedt, a Grainger Distinguished Chair of Engineering in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. Nahrstedt held the CSL Directorship from 2015 to 2025, when she stepped down to lead research efforts at Illinois’ Discovery Partners Institute. Minh Do, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, has served as interim CSL Director since 2025.
Shanbhag is the 12th Director of CSL, which celebrated its 75th anniversary in February 2026. Launched in 1951 to support military efforts during the Korean War, CSL has become a globally renowned research environment where generations of transformative discoveries and innovations have emerged.
Naresh Shanbhag is the Jack S. Kilby Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Illinois’ Grainger Engineering. He is a longtime member of the Coordinated Science Laboratory.