Benjamin Lee

Benjamin C. Lee is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering and the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves as Associate Department Chair in Electrical and Systems Engineering and Co-Director of the NSF Expedition in Computing: Carbon Connect. He earned his Ph.D. and S.M. in Computer Science from Harvard University in 2008 and 2006, respectively, with a minor in Statistics, and his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004, with a minor in Business Administration. Prior to joining Penn in 2020, Lee was Associate Professor from 2015 to 2020 and Assistant Professor from 2010 to 2015 in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Duke University, where he co-directed the NSF Industry/University Collaborative Research Center on Alternative Sustainable and Intelligent Computing. His earlier appointments include NSF Computing Innovation Fellow in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University from 2009 to 2010, post-doctoral researcher in Systems and Networking at Microsoft Research from 2008 to 2009, and internships at Intel Corporation in Microarchitecture Research in 2007 and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Applied Scientific Computing in 2006. He currently serves as Visiting Researcher at Google in the Global Infrastructure Group and previously at Meta AI in Fundamental AI Research from 2021 to 2023.

Lee's research focuses on computer architecture, including microprocessors, memories, and datacenters, emphasizing energy efficiency and environmental sustainability through interdisciplinary links to machine learning and algorithmic economics. He is a member of the Distributed Systems Laboratory, Penn Research in Embedded Computing and Integrated Systems Engineering, The Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences, and the Center for AI-Enabled Systems. His accolades include IEEE Fellow in 2024, ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2019, HPCA Best Paper Award in 2018 and Hall of Fame induction, ASPLOS Best Paper Award in 2016, NSF CAREER Award in 2012, Google Faculty Research Award in 2011, and NSF Computing Innovation Fellowship in 2009. Notable publications comprise "The Computational Sprinting Game" (ASPLOS 2016; HPCA 2018, Best Paper), "Architecting Phase Change Memory as a Scalable DRAM Alternative" (2009, IEEE Micro Top Picks), "Carbon Connect: An Ecosystem for Sustainable Computing" (2024), "Fair-CO2: Fair Attribution for Cloud Carbon Emissions" (ISCA 2025), and "Carbon Explorer: A Holistic Framework for Designing Carbon Aware Datacenters" (ASPLOS 2023, selected for ISCA@50 Retrospective). Additional honors feature multiple Persistent Impact Prizes from the Non-volatile Memory Workshop and Communications of the ACM Research Highlights.

Professional Email: leebcc@seas.upenn.edu