E.N. (Mootaz) Elnozahy is currently the Dean of the Computer, Electrical, and Mathematical ScienceS and Engineering at KAUST. Prior to arriving at KAUST, Mootaz spent 15 years at IBM Research. He started his career as an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in 1993. His research interests are generally in systems, with specific interests in computer system architecture, operating systems, distributed systems, reliable computing, and high performance computer systems. His early work contributed to a defining paper about rollback-recovery in distributed systems. He also built the first low-power server in 2000 at IBM. He led IBM’s participation in the DARPA’s HPCS program, which culminated in 2012 with a machine that outperformed system level benchmarks by three orders of magnitude. 

Education and early career

Dr. Elnozahy has a Ph.D. in computer science from Rice University in 1994, and a B.Sc. in electrical engineering from Cairo University in 1993. His name appears as an inventor on 57 U.S. patents. In addition to the positions he held at CMU and IBM, he was also an adjunct professor at the University of Texas from 1998 to 2012, and a visiting researcher at Bellcore and Bell Labs in the middle of the 1990’s. 

Career recognitions

He received various awards, including elevation to IEEE Fellow in 2010, and the Trail Blazer award from the University of Texas in 2003. He also received various awards at IBM, including named a Master Inventor.

Editorial activities

In the past, Professor Elnozahy served as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, and Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Systems. He served on over 35 technical program committees for leading conferences in the computing systems area.