Education

Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley

Bio

Thuy T. Le received his Ph.D. (1990), M.S. (1987), and B.S. (1985) degrees all from the University of California at Berkeley. Presently, he is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at San Jose State University.

At San Jose State University, he is responsible for teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in digital system design, computer and microprocessor architecture, computer interfacing, system-on-chip design, numerical methods, probability and random processes, and linear system theory. He also serves as a research advisor in digital systems and logic design, ASICs, SOCs, hardware accelerators, computational electronics, microcontrollers, and microprocessors. Professor Le has also held several leadership roles, including Department Chair of Aviation and Engineering Technology, Department Chair of Electrical Engineering, Graduate Advisor, and Undergraduate Advisor. He has also been working on several projects with local companies; these projects include high-performance system architectures, parallel algorithms and applications, digital arithmetic algorithms and circuit design, and System-on-Chip verification and validation.

Before joining San Jose State University, Dr. Le was a Senior Research Engineer of the Scientific Computation Division at Savannah River Laboratory. He also served as an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Mathematical and Engineering Sciences at the University of South Carolina. At Savannah River Laboratory, Dr. Le participated in the design of five new nuclear reactors for Tritium production. In this capacity, he co-authored several computational nuclear reactor physics and radiation shielding codes, which include the three-dimensional vectorized reactor design code (GRIMHX3), the improved collision probability assembly resonance treatment code (MARJORI), the three-dimensional radiation shielding analysis code (ROOMDOSE), and the two-dimensional generalized geometry discrete ordinates code. Dr. Le was also a member of the Quality Assurance team, responsible for verifying and validating computer codes used at the Savannah River Site. These codes include the nuclear fuel cycle and spent fuel analysis codes, the reactor safety analysis system, and the reactor charge design codes.

From 1988 to 1990, Dr. Le was a Physics Instructor at U.C. Berkeley and at the College of Alameda, and a Research Assistant in the Physics Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. While there, he participated in a large DOE-funded research project on hydrogenated amorphous silicon, which included studies of hydrogenated amorphous silicon structure, a very low-noise preamplifier, radiation effects on semiconductor, memory, and electronic systems, and high-energy electromagnetic shower simulation. During the period from 1986 to 1990, Dr. Le also conducted another research project on High-performance Computational Nuclear Reactor Physics in the Nuclear Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley. In this project, he developed a mathematical nodal model that can speed up the solution of three-dimensional neutron diffusion problems in nuclear reactor cores. He successfully prototyped and benchmarked his work by implementing three-dimensional neutron diffusion with a thermal-hydraulic feedback code running on a 64KB IBM PC-XT.

During the periods from 1993 to 1996 and from 1989 to 1990, Dr. Le was an independent contractor for Sierra Nuclear Corporation in California. In this capacity, he served as an independent technical reviewer, reviewing and providing comments on documents and reports in nuclear fuel storage calculations, cask design, and criticality analysis for the transportation of nuclear spent fuel. From 1985 to 1988, he worked as a Reactor Operator and Nuclear Health Physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, on the TRIGA Mark III nuclear research reactor facility.

Professor Le has served as a keynote speaker, general chair, technical program chair, session chair, reviewer, and committee member for a number of international technical conferences and symposia. Topics of his publications and speeches cover broad technical areas in parallel and distributed computing and algorithms, computer architectures and computer networks, hardware accelerators for complex algorithms, artificial intelligence and machine learning, quantum computing, computational reactor physics, engineering curriculum development and assessment.

Professor Le’s current research interests include SOC and Embedded System Design, Hardware Accelerators, Quantum Computing, the implementation of Probability theory and Monte Carlo simulation, and radiation effects on electronic devices and systems.

Professor Le is also a Co-Founder and Advisor of the Vietnamese Strategic Ventures Network (now Strategic Alliance Vietnamese Ventures International) and Chairman of the Board of the United States–Vietnam Foundation.