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]}

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]

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ドル 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]

• 2026: IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award^[19]
• 2025: Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts ^[10]
• 2023: Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors ^[37]
• 2023: IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Charles A. Desoer Technical Achievement Award^[38]
• 2022: Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science ^[39]
• 2022: IEEE Computer Society Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award^[40]
• 2021: Outstanding Electrical and Computer Engineer Award, Purdue University^[41]
• 2020: Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery ^[42]
• 2018: Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers ^[43]

• 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.

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]}

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]

• Official website