Jan Rabaey is Professor Emeritus and Professor in the Graduate School 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) and the Berkeley Ubiquitous SwarmLab, directed the GSRC and MuSyC SRC-DARPA multi-university research centers,  and has 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 (IoT avant-la-lettre), the Swarm (IoT on steroids), Brain-Machine interfaces and the Human Intranet. His current interests include the conception of the next-generation distributed systems, as well as the exploration of the interaction between the cyber and the biological worlds.

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 including the 2025 IEEE James H. Mulligan Jr Education Medal, is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, and has been involved in a broad variety of start-up ventures.