Who Am I?
I am James Larus, a professor and dean of the School of Computer and Communications Sciences (IC) at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), one of the two Swiss federal technical universities, along with ETH Zurich, and one of the world's top computer science departments.
I am an American, with no obvious connections to Switzerland, so how did I end up in this position? The answer can be summed in two cliches: "it is not what you know, but who you know" and "you have to be in the right place at the right time." After Martin Vetterli, the previous dean, left to head the Swiss National Science Foundation (and, as of Jan. 1 2017, to return to EPFL as its president!), EPFL starting looking for a new dean of IC.
I knew an earlier dean, Willy Zwaenepoel, as a colleague who worked on similar research early in my career, and the head of the recruiting committee, Babak Falsafi, was a student at the UW Madison, where I started my career. They asked if I would be interested in applying, and fortunately this question came as I was thinking of leaving Microsoft Research after 16 years and in the year before our youngest son went off to college. An earlier opportunity would have required our son(s) to finish high school in Switzerland, a difficult prospect given the differences between the systems. Later, I would have left Microsoft Research and started somewhere else. Diana and I debated: California or Switzerland, and happily, we choose Switzerland. It has been great.
I'll blog about the differences between the Swiss and US systems and what I've seen in later posts, but if you want to know details of my career, take a look at my EPFL website: https://people.epfl.ch/cgi-bin/people?id=240726&op=bio&lang=en&cvlang=en.
I am an American, with no obvious connections to Switzerland, so how did I end up in this position? The answer can be summed in two cliches: "it is not what you know, but who you know" and "you have to be in the right place at the right time." After Martin Vetterli, the previous dean, left to head the Swiss National Science Foundation (and, as of Jan. 1 2017, to return to EPFL as its president!), EPFL starting looking for a new dean of IC.
I knew an earlier dean, Willy Zwaenepoel, as a colleague who worked on similar research early in my career, and the head of the recruiting committee, Babak Falsafi, was a student at the UW Madison, where I started my career. They asked if I would be interested in applying, and fortunately this question came as I was thinking of leaving Microsoft Research after 16 years and in the year before our youngest son went off to college. An earlier opportunity would have required our son(s) to finish high school in Switzerland, a difficult prospect given the differences between the systems. Later, I would have left Microsoft Research and started somewhere else. Diana and I debated: California or Switzerland, and happily, we choose Switzerland. It has been great.
I'll blog about the differences between the Swiss and US systems and what I've seen in later posts, but if you want to know details of my career, take a look at my EPFL website: https://people.epfl.ch/cgi-bin/people?id=240726&op=bio&lang=en&cvlang=en.
Comments
Post a Comment