Walid A. Najjar is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California Riverside. His research interests are in the fields of computer architecture and compiler optimizations, embedded systems and sensor networks. Lately, he has been very active in the area of compilation for FPGA-based code acceleration and reconfigurable computing. NSF, DARPA and various industry sponsors have supported his research.

Walid received a B.E. in Electrical Engineering from the American University of Beirut in 1979 and the M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California in 1985 and 1988 respectively. From 1989 to 2000 he was on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at Colorado State University, before that with the USC-Information Sciences Institute. He currently serves as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Computers. He was a recipient of the IBM Faculty Award and was elected Fellow of the IEEE and the AAAS.