William H. Sanders named the new Acting Director of Coordinated Science Laboratory

2/13/2013 Kim Gudeman

William H. Sanders has been named Acting Director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois. He replaces Ravi K. Iyer, who was recently appointed Illinois’s Interim Vice Chancellor for Research.

Written by Kim Gudeman

William H. Sanders has been named Acting Director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois. He replaces Ravi K. Iyer, who was recently appointed
Illinois’s Interim Vice Chancellor for Research.

“Professor Sanders has demonstrated outstanding performance as Director of ITI,” stated Ilesanmi Adesida, dean of the College of Engineering. “His continued leadership at both the College and Campus levels will be invaluable at this critical time as we continue to advance the College of Engineering’s pre-eminent position in information science and technology.”

Sanders is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering, the Director of the Information Trust Institute, a faculty member in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a faculty affiliate in Computer Science.

“Bill is a world-renowned researcher in computer science and engineering, specializing in modeling, evaluating, and designing trusted systems,” Iyer says. “He understands the multidisciplinary nature of information technology and will ensure CSL’s research stays relevant in this rapidly changing era.”

Sanders came to Illinois in 1994 as an Associate Professor of electrical and computer engineering and resident researcher at CSL, earning the title of Professor in 1998. At Illinois, his research has focused on dependability and security evaluation, fault-tolerant computing, reliable and secure distributed systems, and computer networks and protocols.

Since 2004, he has been the inaugural Director of the Information Trust Institute (ITI), which provides national leadership combining research and education with industrial outreach in trustworthy and secure information systems. In ITI, he is also the principal investigator of two research centers, the NSF/DOE/DHS Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIP) Center, and the Boeing Trusted Software Center. He will continue as Director of ITI and those two research centers while serving as Acting Director of CSL.

Sanders holds a Ph.D. in computer science and engineering, a M.S.E. in computer, information, and control engineering, and a B.S.E in computer engineering, all from the University of Michigan.

He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In addition, he serves on the editorial board of Performance Evaluation and is the Area Editor for Simulation and Modeling of Computer Systems for the ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation. He is a past Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Fault-Tolerant Computing and past Vice-Chair of IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing.

Sanders has published more than 200 technical papers and is co-developer of three tools for assessing the performance of systems represented as stochastic activity networks: METASAN, UltraSAN, and Möbius. He is also a co-developer of the Loki distributed system fault injector and the AQuA/ITUA middlewares for providing dependability/security to distributed and networked applications.

About the Coordinated Science Laboratory

The Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois is one of the nation’s premier multidisciplinary research laboratories, focusing on information technology at the crossroads of computing, control, and communications. Created nearly 60 years ago, CSL continues to transform society by developing and deploying new technologies in areas such as defense, medicine, environmental sciences, robotics, life-enhancement for the disabled, and aeronautics. For more information, visit www.csl.illinois.edu.


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This story was published February 13, 2013.