Prof. Sachin Sapatnekar received the B. Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 1987, the M. S. degree from Syracuse University in 1989, and the Ph. D. degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1992. He has worked at Texas Instruments during the summer of 1990, and at Intel Corporation during the summer of 1997. His other major educational qualifications include self-taught basic juggling under the long-distance tutelage of the world-renowned Klutz School in 1991, and the PADI Open Water Diver Certification from Deep Sea Divers Den in 2001. With his once-a-decade average of trying something new, he is sure to remain his same old boring self until 2011.

He was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University from 1992 to 1997. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota, where he holds the Robert and Marjorie Henle chair. His current research interests lie in developing efficient techniques for computer-aided design of integrated circuits, and are primarily centered around physical design, timing and simulation issues, and optimization algorithms. He has authored/coauthored/coedited five books and has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems (current) and the IEEE Transactions on CAD (currently as deputy editor-in-chief) and the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Analog and Digital Signal Processing (in the past), has served on the Technical Program Committee for various conferences, including as technical program co-chair for DAC 2006 and 2007. He has been a Distinguished Visitor for the IEEE Computer Society and a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, and is a recipient of the NSF Career Award, the SRC Technical Excellence Award, and best paper awards at the DAC'97, ICCD'98, DAC'01 and DAC'03 conferences. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.