Rate My Professor Mark Horowitz

Mark Horowitz is the Fortinet Founders Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Yahoo! Founders Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University. He holds appointments as Professor of Electrical Engineering and Professor of Computer Science. Horowitz received his BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering from MIT in 1978 and his PhD from Stanford University in 1984. His early research focused on high-performance digital systems, integrating computer-aided design tools, circuit design, and system architecture. He developed early RISC microprocessors and contributed to distributed shared memory multiprocessors, including the Stanford DASH and FLASH projects. In 1990, he co-founded Rambus Inc. to develop high-bandwidth memory interface technology. Returning to Stanford in 1991, his group pioneered high-speed link designs that influenced modern interfaces such as SDRAM and LPDDR. In the 2000s, he collaborated with Marc Levoy on computational photography, leading to innovations in the Lytro camera. Currently, Horowitz applies electrical engineering and computer science methods to neuro and molecular biology problems and develops agile design methodologies for analog and digital VLSI circuits. He has chaired the Electrical Engineering Department from 2008 to 2012 and since 2023.