Jan Rabaey is Professor Emeritus in the EECS Department the University of California at Berkeley, after being the holder of the Donald O. Pederson Distinguished Professorship at the same institute for over 30 years. He is a founding director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC), the Berkeley Ubiquitous SwarmLab, and the SIA-DARPA GSRC Center. He served as the Electrical Engineering Division Chair at Berkeley twice. From 2019 until 2025, he also served as the CTO of the System-Technology Co-Optimization (STCO) Division of IMEC, Belgium.

Prof. Rabaey has made high-impact contributions to a number of fields, including low power integrated circuits, advanced wireless systems, mobile devices, sensor networks, and ubiquitous computing. Some of the systems he helped envision include the infoPad (a forerunner of the iPad), PicoNets and PicoRadios, the Swarm, Brain-Machine interfaces and the Human Intranet.

He is the primary author of the influential “Digital Integrated Circuits: A Design Perspective” textbook that has served to educate hundreds of thousands of students all over the world. He is the recipient of numerous awards, amongst others the 2009 EDAA Lifetime Achievement Award. Most recently, he received the 2025 IEEE James H. Mulligan Jr Education Medal, the 2025 IEEE CASS John Choma Education Award, and the IEEE 2026 Donald O. Pederson Solid State Circuits Award. He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, and has been involved in a broad variety of start-up ventures.