Hai Li

Hai (Helen) Li is the Marie Foote Reel E’46 Distinguished Professor and Department Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Duke University. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees from Tsinghua University, and her Ph.D. degree from Purdue University. Her research interests include neuromorphic circuits and systems for brain-inspired computing, machine learning acceleration and trustworthy AI, conventional and emerging memory design and architecture, and software and hardware co-design. She is the founding director of the Duke Center for Computational Evolutionary Intelligence and co-founder of the first NSF IUCRC center dedicated to AI computing hardware. She is the co-PI for Athena, the NSF AI Institute for Edge Computing.

Dr. Li has made pioneering contributions to neuromorphic computing and deep-learning acceleration. her work is noted for fundamental breakthroughs, technology development, and industry impact. She has over 400 peer reviewed publications, 79 patents, and has received many awards, including Ten Year Retrospective Influential Paper Award from ICCAD, TUM-IAS Hans Fischer Fellowship from Germany, ELATE Fellowship, nine best paper awards, and another ten best paper nominations from IEEE/ACM. Dr. Li is a fellow of IEEE, ACM, and NAI.

Dr. Li’s leadership extends to the academic community. She has served as Associate Editor-in-Chief or Associate Editor for numerous ACM and IEEE journals and has held prominent leadership roles, including General Chair and Technical Program Chair for numerous IEEE/ACM conferences. Notably, she is a long-standing member of the Executive Committee for the Design Automation Conference, one of the largest and most prestigious conferences in the IEEE Computer Society.