William Sanders

Since January 2020, William H. Sanders is the Dr. William D. and Nancy W. Strecker Dean of the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and a professor of electrical and computer engineering. He is a leader in engineering research and academia, a well-respected collaborator in higher education who builds strategic public-private partnerships.

Prior, he was Department Head of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was previously a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Affiliate Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the ACM, a past Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Fault-Tolerant Computing, and past Vice-Chair of the IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing. He was the founding Director of the Information Trust Institute (www.iti.illinois.edu) at Illinois.

Dr. Sanders’s research interests include secure and dependable computing and security and dependability metrics and evaluation, with a focus on critical infrastructures. He has published more than 200 technical papers in those areas. He is currently the Director and PI of the DOE/DHS Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIPG) Center (www.tcipg.org), which is at the forefront of national efforts to make the U.S. power grid smart and resilient.

He is also co-developer of three tools for assessing computer-based systems: METASAN, UltraSAN, and Möbius. Möbius and UltraSAN have been distributed widely to industry and academia; more than 500 licenses for the tools have been issued to universities, companies, and NASA for evaluating the performance, dependability, and security of a variety of systems. He is also a co-developer of the Loki distributed system fault injector, the AQuA/ITUA middlewares for providing dependability/security to distributed and networked applications, and the NetAPT (Network Access Policy Tool) for assessing the security of networked systems.