William Robinson Email Address

Interim Vice Provost for Strategic Initiatives

Vanderbilt University is a private, nonsectarian, coeducational research university in Nashville, Tennessee, USA. Founded in 1873, the university is named for shipping and rail magnate "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided Vanderbilt its initial $1 million endowment despite having never been to the South. The Commodore hoped that his gift and the greater work of the university would help to heal the sectional wounds inflicted by the Civil War.

William H. Robinson received his B.S. in electrical engineering from the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) in 1996 and his M.S. in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in 1998. He received his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Georgia Tech in 2003. In August 2003, Dr. Robinson joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Vanderbilt University as an Assistant Professor, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2010. He is the first African American to earn promotion and win tenure in the Vanderbilt University School of Engineering. Currently, he serves as an Associate Dean in the School of Engineering. Dr. Robinson leads the Security And Fault Tolerance (SAF-T) Research Group at Vanderbilt University, whose mission is to conduct transformational research that addresses the reliability and security of computing systems. He collaborates with both the Institute for Space and Defense Electronics and the Institute for Software Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University. In addition to his research activities, he also participated with the Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology (TRUST), an NSF Science and Technology Center, where he served as the Outreach Director. Dr. Robinson’s major honors include selection for a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program Award and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Computer Science Study Panel, both in 2008. Dr. Robinson is a Senior Member of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He is a member of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), and a lifetime member of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE). Dr. Robinson is a Life Member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. and a member of The 100 Black Men of Middle Tennessee, Inc. Specialties: Computer architecture, VLSI Design, Hardware reliability, Hardware security