Karem Sakallah

Karem A. Sakallah (S'76-M'81-SM'92-F'98) received his BE degree in electrical engineering from the American University of Beirut in 1975, and his MS and PhD degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, in 1977 and 1981.

In 1981, he was with the Department of Electrical Engineering at CMU as a Visiting Assistant Professor. From 1982 to 1988, he was with the Semiconductor Engineering Computer-Aided Design Group at Digital Equipment Corporation in Hudson, MA, where he headed the Analysis and Simulation Advanced Development Team. Since September 1988, he has been with the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, as a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

From September 1994 to March 1995, he was on a six-month sabbatical leave with the Cadence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, CA. From 2006 to 2008, he was a member of an advisory board for the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science, and Community Development that was tasked with developing plans for a computing research institute in Qatar. Some of this planning took place while he was on sabbatical leave at Carnegie Mellon University's Qatar campus during the 2007/2008 academic year. The institute was founded in 2011 and Karem was asked to serve as its Chief Scientist, a role he played from 2014 to 2016.

Karem's research focuses on the development of software tools to solve real-world analysis, design, and verification problems using mathematically-rigorous modeling and algorithmically-scalable computation. Systems developed along these lines include the GRASP SAT solver (for which he as a co-recipient of the CAV 2009 award), the SAUCY symmetry detector, the Averroes hardware verifier, and the EUForia software verifier. He is currently working on a symmetry-based prototype verifier for unbounded protocols.

Karem is a fellow of the IEEE and the ACM.