Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Arun K. Somani came to Iowa State in 1997 as the inaugural recipient of the David C. Nicholas Professorship in Electrical and Computer Engineering, a position he held until 2002 when he received the department’s first endowed Jerry R. Junkins Chair. A year later, Somani was appointed the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s chair. He is an Anson Marston Distinguished Professor, Association of Computing Machinery Distinguished Engineer, and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

During his time as department chair, Somani has led the department to create five strategic research areas in bioengineering, cyber infrastructure, distributed sensing and decision making, energy infrastructure, and small-scale technology. He also helped lead an initiative to create a degree program for students from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) in India to study in India for two years and then at Iowa State University for two years to finish their undergraduate degrees.

Somani developed and copyrighted Hierarchical Modeling and Analysis Package software (2001) and authored Survivability and Traffic Grooming in WDM Optical Networks (2006), as well as wrote more than 250 conference papers and journal articles. Somani’s research interests include optical fiber networking, computer system architecture, dependable computing, and cyber infrastructure. In 2006, he received the Warren B. Boast Undergraduate Teaching Award.

Before coming to Iowa State, Somani was a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle from 1985 to 2003.

He received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from BITS-Pilani (1973), master’s degree in computer engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (1979), and PhD in electrical engineering from McGill University in Montreal, Canada (1985).

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