Xun (Steve) Jian has been appointed as an assistant professor of computer science in Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering. Jian is one of 27 new faculty members hired by the college for the 2017-18 academic year.

Jian’s lab seeks to discover how computer architecture can become more reliable and secure while maintaining high performance and energy efficiency. His research areas include ways to understand and develop better memory architectures, high-performance architectures, energy-efficient architectures, and reliable and secure architectures. Jian currently conducts research in the high-performance, energy-efficient, Assured Processing Lab.

Prior to coming to Virginia Tech, Jian conducted research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, working to reduce high-energy overhead by protecting supercomputers with Chipkill Correct ECC, computer memory technology that protects computer memory systems from any single memory chip failure as well as multibit errors from any portion of a single memory chip.

In 2016, Jian was honored by the Young Researcher at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, a gathering of laureates of some of the most prestigious prizes in mathematics and computer science, including the Abel Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, and Nevanlinna Prize. Additionally, Jian was awarded the M.E. Van Valkenburg Graduate Research Award at the University of Illinois.

Jian earned a bachelor’s in electrical engineering in 2010 and a doctorate in computer engineering in 2017, both from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Written by Amy Loeffler

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