In Memory of Dr. Amar Mukherjee
June 9, 2015
It is with great sorrow that we announce the passing of Dr. Amar Mukherjee, Emeritus Professor in Computer Science, on Wednesday, June 3, 2015. A memorial service was held for him on Monday, June 8th attended by family, friends and a good number of EECS faculty.
Dr. Amar Mukherjee, a Fellow of the IEEE, is internationally recognized for his pioneering contributions to Switching Theory, Hardware Algorithms for Non-numeric Computation, VLSI Design, VLSI Algorithms and Architectures. He joined UCF in 1979 and served as the CS Chair from 1984 to 1988. He established the first industrial affiliates program at UCF and the CS Department received CSAB (Computer Science Accreditation Board) accreditation for the first time during his tenure as a Chair. He started the VLSI research and teaching program at UCF at a time when only a few elite schools in the United States were privileged enough to have such programs. He is the author of the book Introduction to nMOS and CMOS VLSI Systems Design (Prentice Hall, 1986) which was used throughout the world as a text for VLSI design courses for many years. He received many awards including the meritorious service award of the IEEE for innovative leadership in increasing the vitality of the VLSI Technical Committee. He secured and participated in more than 30 research grants totaling around $3.5M at UCF, with significant consistent funding from NSF and a reasonable amount of industry funding that supplemented the federal research grants. Dr. Mukherjee has graduated 16 Ph.D.’s, including the first Ph.D. in Computer Science in the state of Florida. Two of his PhD students became IEEE fellows and another student, Alan Eustace, became Senior Vice President at Google. Dr. Mukherjee retired in 2010 after a distinguished service at UCF for 32 years.
Dr. Amar Mukherjee is survived by his wife, two daughters, and a granddaughter.