Dr. Bruce Jacob

Bruce Jacob joined the Department of Cyber Science in the Fall of 2022. Before that, he was a professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland for 25 years, where he studied memory systems and memory devices. He designed computer-system architectures and computer memory-system architectures for both industry and government, national and international. For instance, he helped Micron design their Hybrid Memory Cube DRAM architecture, he redesigned Cray’s memory controller for their Black Widow memory system, he helped Northrop Grumman design a system interconnect for their experimental ultra-low-power datacenter, and he designed a high-performance memory system for the 1024-core Teraflux chip funded by the European Commission. 

Between college and graduate school, Jacob worked in the start-up industry in Boston for two different telecommunications companies, serving as a software engineer at Boston Technology and then as the chief engineer and system architect at Priority Call Management. Both of these start-up companies were successful—in particular, Priority Call Management, for which Jacob designed and developed the product’s system-level architecture, its distributed middleware code, and its object-oriented applications framework, was purchased in the late 1990s. 

Jacob has has written two textbooks on computer memory systems and many, many articles on memory systems, computer design, embedded systems, operating system design, astrophysics, and algorithmic composition. He holds a patent in memory-systems design and three patents in the circuit design of electric guitars—in 2009, the electric guitars were featured on Washington DC local television and radio stations; in articles appearing in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and The Chronicle of Higher Education; and on National Public Radio (Jacob and his graduate student were interviewed by Robert Siegel on All Things Considered on July 10, 2009). 

Jacob received his A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard in 1988, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science & Engineering from The University of Michigan in 1997. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. His CV can be found here (link to CV).