Biography:Yiran Chen

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Yiran Chen
陈怡然
Yiran Chen
Yiran Chen's Portrait
Born (1976-02-29) February 29, 1976 (age 50)
Zhengzhou, Henan, China
Education
Known for
Spouse(s)Hai "Helen" Li
Children2
Awards
  • IEEE CEDA A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award (2026)
  • Member of European Academy of Sciences and Arts (2025)
  • NAI Fellow (2023)
  • AAAS Fellow (2022)
  • ACM Fellow (2020)
  • IEEE Fellow (2018)
Scientific career
Theses
  • Design Techniques for Power Efficiency and Robustness in Scaled High-performance Systems (2005)
  • Research on Dynamic Property and Gain-Clamping of EDFA (2001)
Doctoral advisor
  • Kaushik Roy
  • Cheng-Kok Koh
Other academic advisorsChong-Cheng Fan
Websiteece.duke.edu/people/yiran-chen/

Yiran Chen (Chinese: 陈怡然; pinyin: Chén Yírán; born February 29, 1976) is a Chinese-born American computer scientist and electrical engineer whose research concerns emerging memory technologies, neuromorphic computing, and machine-learning systems. He is the John Cocke Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University,[1] where he directs the U.S. National Science Foundation AI Institute for Edge Computing Leveraging Next Generation Networks (Athena) and the Institute of AI Engineering.[2][3]

Early life and education

Chen was born in Zhengzhou, Henan, China, into a family of middle-school teachers.[4] He entered the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University in 1994, was selected for an accelerated "4+2" program, and completed his undergraduate degree in 1998.[4] He received an M.S. from Tsinghua in 2001, advised by Chongcheng Fan,[5] and a Ph.D. from Purdue University in 2005, advised by Kaushik Roy and Cheng-Kok Koh.[6]

Career and research

Chen worked at Synopsys in Silicon Valley from 2005 to 2007, where he developed PrimeTime VX, a statistical static timing analysis tool.[7][8] In 2007, he and his wife, Hai (Helen) Li, joined Seagate Technology's Advanced Technology Group as circuit designers working on spintronic memory.[9] He joined the University of Pittsburgh as an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in 2010 and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2014.[10][11]

Chen moved to Duke University in January 2017 and was named the John Cocke Distinguished Professor in 2023.[1] In 2021, he received a $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation to establish and direct Athena, an NSF AI institute focused on edge computing.[2][12] In 2026, he became director of Duke's Institute of AI Engineering.[3][13] With Hai Li and Huanrui Yang, he published the textbook Machine Learning and Neural Networks: A Computer Engineering Perspective (Springer, 2026),[14] and he received the Duke Graduate School's Dean's Award for Excellence in Mentoring in 2024.[15]

At Seagate, Chen led the design of a 16-kilobit spin-transfer torque random-access memory (STT-RAM) test chip[9] and co-authored a 2009 study describing a spintronic memristor, which was covered by IEEE Spectrum.[16][17] His 2008 paper proposing 3D-stacked magnetic RAM as on-chip memory[18] received the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in 2026.[19]

Two of his group's 2014 papers on neural-network accelerators based on nonvolatile memory received ten-year retrospective influential-paper awards from ASP-DAC (2024) and ICCAD (2023).[20][21] His 2016 NeurIPS paper introduced structured-sparsity methods for compressing neural networks and was ranked by Paper Digest among the most influential NeurIPS 2016 papers.[22][23] His work has also received best-paper awards at DATE 2017,[24] KDD 2020,[25] MICRO 2021,[26] ASP-DAC 2023,[27] and the 2024 AAAI Spring Symposium Series,[28] as well as the IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award.[29] At the 2024 International Conference on Machine Learning, his group presented LaMAGIC, a language-model-based method for generating analog circuit topologies.[30]

Chen co-founded the Duke Center for Computational Evolutionary Intelligence[31] and the NSF Industry–University Cooperative Research Center for Alternative Sustainable and Intelligent Computing.[32] He served as editor-in-chief of IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine from 2020 to 2023 and became founding editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Artificial Intelligence in 2024.[33] He chaired ACM's Special Interest Group on Design Automation from 2021 to 2024[34] and the steering committee of the IEEE Non-Volatile Memory Systems and Applications Symposium,[35] and served on a National Academies committee on machine learning in safety-critical applications from 2022 to 2025.[36]

Awards and honors

Selected publications

  • X. Dong, X. Wu, G. Sun, Y. Xie, H. Li, and Y. Chen, "Circuit and Microarchitecture Evaluation of 3D Stacking Magnetic RAM (MRAM) as a Universal Memory Replacement," ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, 2008, pp. 554–559.
  • X. Wang, Y. Chen, H. Xi, H. Li, and D. V. Dimitrov, "Spintronic Memristor through Spin Torque Induced Magnetization Motion," IEEE Electron Device Letters, vol. 30, no. 3, 2009, pp. 294–297.
  • Y. Chen, H. Li, X. Wang, W. Zhu, W. Xu, and T. Zhang, "A 130 nm 1.2V/3.3V 16 Kb Spin-Transfer Torque Random Access Memory with Nondestructive Self-Reference Sensing Scheme," IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, vol. 47, no. 2, 2012, pp. 560–573.
  • W. Wen, C. Wu, Y. Wang, Y. Chen, and H. Li, "Learning Structured Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks," Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2016.
  • C.-C. Chang, Y. Shen, S. Fan, J. Li, S. Zhang, N. Cao, Y. Chen, and X. Zhang, "LaMAGIC: Language-Model-based Topology Generation for Analog Integrated Circuits," International Conference on Machine Learning, 2024.

Other activities

While at Tsinghua, Chen and several classmates co-founded the Weilan online bookstore (welan.com).[4] His Weibo channel on research and higher education has more than 591,000 followers.[44] He is a founding member of the steering committee of the Academic Alliance on AI Policy[45] and has commented on artificial intelligence in media outlets including Bloomberg, The New York Times, and Reuters.[46][47][48]

Personal life

Chen is married to Hai (Helen) Li, the Marie Foote Reel E'46 Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University.[49] They have two sons.[50]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Duke Awards 44 Distinguished Professorships". May 4, 2023. https://today.duke.edu/2023/05/duke-awards-44-distinguished-professorships. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Athena: AI Institute for Edge Computing". Duke University. https://athena.duke.edu/. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 "Yiran Chen: Academic Experience". Duke University. https://scholars.duke.edu/person/yiran.chen/academic-experience. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 "Error: no |title= specified when using {{Cite web}}" (in zh). March 22, 2021. https://www.tsinghua.org.cn/info/1014/33415.htm. 
  5. ↑ Master's thesis: Research on Dynamic Property and Gain-Clamping of EDFA, Tsinghua University, 2001.
  6. ↑ Ph.D. thesis: Design Techniques for Power Efficiency and Robustness in Scaled High-performance Systems, Purdue University, 2005.
  7. ↑ "Invisible Shield: Technology overview (inventor profile of Yiran Chen)". University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute. https://www.innovation.pitt.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/ID-02969-Invisible-Shield.pdf. 
  8. ↑ "Synopsys Extends PrimeTime and Star-RCXT With Statistical Capabilities To Address Variation-Aware Design Challenges" (Press release). Synopsys. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Y. Chen, H. Li, X. Wang, W. Zhu, W. Xu and T. Zhang, "A 130 nm 1.2V/3.3V 16 Kb Spin-Transfer Torque Random Access Memory with Nondestructive Self-Reference Sensing Scheme," IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC), vol. 47, no.2, Feb. 2012, pp. 560-573.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 "Yiran Chen". Duke University. https://ece.duke.edu/people/yiran-chen/. 
  11. ↑ "Yiran Chen". https://www.computer.org/profiles/yiran-chen. 
  12. ↑ "NSF Launches Artificial Intelligence Research Center at Duke". July 29, 2021. https://today.duke.edu/2021/07/nsf-launches-artificial-intelligence-research-center-duke. 
  13. ↑ Chen, Claire (September 30, 2025). "Pratt considers proposal for new AI engineering institute, undergraduate major". The Duke Chronicle. https://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-university-pratt-engineering-artificial-intelligence-institute-undergraduate-degree-major-faculty-council-research-industry-ai-20250930. 
  14. ↑ "Machine Learning and Neural Networks: A Computer Engineering Perspective". Springer. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-20979-5. 
  15. ↑ "2024 Dean's Award: Yiran Chen, Ph.D.". Duke University Graduate School. March 19, 2024. https://gradschool.duke.edu/story/2024-deans-award-yiran-chen-phd/. 
  16. ↑ X. Wang, Y. Chen, H. Xi, H. Li, and D. V. Dimitrov, "Spintronic Memristor through Spin Torque Induced Magnetization Motion," IEEE Electron Device Letters (EDL), Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 294-297, Mar. 2009.
  17. ↑ Savage, Neil (March 16, 2009). "Spintronic Memristors". https://spectrum.ieee.org/spintronic-memristors. 
  18. ↑ X. Dong, X. Wu, G. Sun, Y. Xie, H. Li, and Y. Chen, "Circuit and Microarchitecture Evaluation of 3D Stacking Magnetic RAM (MRAM) as a Universal Memory Replacement," ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), Jun. 2008, pp. 554-559.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 "Magnetic Memory: Laying the Foundations for Modern AI". Duke University Pratt School of Engineering. June 29, 2026. https://pratt.duke.edu/news/mram-technical-impact-award/. 
  20. ↑ B. Li, Y. Wang, Y. Wang, Y. Chen, and H. Yang, "Training Itself: Mixed-signal Training Acceleration for Memristor-based Neural Network," Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC), Jan. 2014, pp. 361-366.
  21. ↑ B. Liu, H. Li, Y. Chen, X. Li, T. Huang, Q. Wu, and M. Barnell, "Reduction and IR-drop Compensations Techniques for Reliable Neuromorphic Computing Systems," IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD), Nov. 2014, pp. 63-70.
  22. ↑ W. Wen, C. Wu, Y. Wang, Y. Chen, and H. Li, "Learning Structured Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks," Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Dec. 2016.
  23. ↑ "Most Influential NIPS Papers (2021-02)". February 2021. https://resources.paperdigest.org/2021/02/most-influential-nips-papers/. 
  24. ↑ J. Mao, X. Chen, K. Nixon, C. Krieger, and Y. Chen, "MoDNN: Local Distributed Mobile Computing System for Deep Neural Network," Design, Automation & Test in Europe (DATE), Mar. 2017, pp. 1396-1401.
  25. ↑ A. Li, Y. Duan, H. Yang, Y. Chen, and J. Yang, "TIPRDC: Task-Independent Privacy-Respecting Data Crowdsourcing Framework for Deep Learning with Anonymized Intermediate Representations," ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), Aug. 2020, pp. 824-832.
  26. ↑ "Fast Power Modelling for Accurate CPU Power Introspection". https://developer.arm.com/community/arm-research/b/articles/posts/fast-power-modelling-for-accurate-cpu-power-introspection. 
  27. ↑ C.-C. Chang, J. Pan, Z. Xie, J. Hu, and Y. Chen, "Rethink before Releasing your Model: ML Model Extraction Attack in EDA," Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC), Jan. 2023, pp. 252-257.
  28. ↑ J. Sun, Z. Xu, H. Yin, D. Yang, D. Xu, Z. Du, Y. Chen, and H. R. Roth, "FedBPT: Efficient Federated Black-box Prompt Tuning for Large Language Models on the Edge," Federated Learning on the Edge Symposium of The AAAI Spring Symposium series (SSS), Mar. 2024.
  29. ↑ "Chen Wins IEEE Pederson Award". Duke University Pratt School of Engineering. https://pratt.duke.edu/news/chen-wins-ieee-pederson-award/. 
  30. ↑ C.-C. Chang, Y. Shen, S. Fan, J. Li, S. Zhang, N. Cao, Y. Chen, and X. Zhang, "LaMAGIC: Language-Model-based Topology Generation for Analog Integrated Circuits," the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024. https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/chang24c.html
  31. ↑ "Duke Center for Computational Evolutionary Intelligence". Duke University. https://cei.pratt.duke.edu/. 
  32. ↑ "NSF IUCRC for Alternative Sustainable and Intelligent Computing". Duke University. https://asic.pratt.duke.edu/. 
  33. ↑ "Chen Named Inaugural Editor-in-Chief of AI-Focused Journal". Duke University Pratt School of Engineering. February 29, 2024. https://pratt.duke.edu/news/chen-editor-tcasai/. 
  34. ↑ "ACM SIGDA E-Newsletter, July 2021". ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation. July 2021. https://www.sigda.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/July-2021-ACM_SIGDA-E-NEWSLETTER.pdf. 
  35. ↑ "Organizing Committee". https://nvmsa2021.github.io/committee.html. 
  36. ↑ "Using Machine Learning in Safety-Critical Applications: Setting a Research Agenda". National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/using-machine-learning-in-safety-critical-applications-setting-a-research-agenda. 
  37. ↑ "2023 NAI Fellows List". National Academy of Inventors. December 2023. https://academyofinventors.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/2023-NAI-Fellows-List.pdf. 
  38. ↑ "Congratulations to the 2023 IEEE CAS Society Award Recipients". IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. https://ieee-cas.org/post/announcement/congratulations-2023-ieee-cas-society-award-recipients. 
  39. ↑ "2022 AAAS Fellows". American Association for the Advancement of Science. https://www.aaas.org/programs/fellows/2022-aaas-fellows. 
  40. ↑ "Chen Wins IEEE 2022 Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award". Duke University Pratt School of Engineering. January 27, 2022. https://pratt.duke.edu/news/chen-wins-ieee-2022-edward-j-mccluskey-technical-achievement-award/. 
  41. ↑ "2021 Outstanding Electrical & Computer Engineers". Purdue University Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. https://engineering.purdue.edu/ECE/Alums/OECE/2021. 
  42. ↑ "2020 ACM Fellows recognized for work that underpins contemporary computing" (Press release). Association for Computing Machinery. January 13, 2021. Retrieved July 21, 2026 – via GlobeNewswire.
  43. ↑ "Professor Yiran Chen Named IEEE Fellow". Duke Center for Computational Evolutionary Intelligence. November 18, 2017. https://cei.pratt.duke.edu/news/professor-yiran-chen-named-ieee-fellow. 
  44. ↑ "Yiran Chen on Weibo". https://www.weibo.com/u/2199733231. 
  45. ↑ "Academic Alliance on AI Policy". https://www.aaaipolicy.org/. 
  46. ↑ "China's Manus Follows DeepSeek in Challenging US AI Lead". Bloomberg. March 10, 2025. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-10/china-s-manus-challenges-us-tech-firms-in-race-to-build-ai-agents. 
  47. ↑ "What DeepSeek's Success Says About China's Ability to Nurture Talent". The New York Times. February 10, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/world/asia/china-deepseek-education.html. 
  48. ↑ Wagstaff, Jeremy (June 7, 2012). "Pushing the PRAM: when chips just can't get any smaller". Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/pushing-the-pram-when-chips-just-can-t-get-any-smaller-idUSBRE8561CE/. 
  49. ↑ "Hai "Helen" Li". Duke University. https://ece.duke.edu/people/hai-helen-li/. 
  50. ↑ "Interview with Dr. Yiran Chen". https://www.edn.com/interview-with-dr-yiran-chen/. 



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