Pedram Khalili Receives IEEE Technical Achievement Award
Khalili was honored for “contributions to the development of voltage-controlled magnetic tunnel junctions and their applications in computing systems"
Northwestern Engineering’s Pedram Khalili has received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Nanotechnology Council 2025 Technical Achievement Award.
The annual award recognizes individuals with outstanding and innovative contributions to the field of nanotechnology within the last 15 years. Khalili was cited for “contributions to the development of voltage-controlled magnetic tunnel junctions and their applications in computing systems.”
“It is a great honor to be recognized by the IEEE Nanotechnology Council for the development of voltage-controlled magnetic tunnel junctions, which are devices that blend nanotechnology and magnetism to enable new compute functionalities,” said Khalili, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and co-director of the joint Applied Physics Graduate Program with Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.
Khalili’s work is focused on developing the high-performance and energy-efficient computing systems of the future, starting from novel materials that enable incorporation of new physics and functionalities into systems. His research interests include nanoelectronics, spintronics, quantum materials, hardware for artificial intelligence, and probabilistic computing architectures.
A Northwestern Engineering team led by Khalili recently demonstrated a scalable approach to building a probabilistic Ising machine (PIM), or probabilistic computer. The researchers developed an integrated probabilistic computer that combines a custom-designed digital silicon chip with the voltage-controlled magnetic tunnel junctions (V-MTJs) pioneered by Khalili’s Physical Electronics Research Laboratory.
Importantly, unlike some other emerging approaches to computing, these PIMs can be manufactured using transistor-based technology that is commercially available today, and they operate at room temperature.
Through the US National Science Foundation’s Future of Semiconductors program, Khalili leads a multi-institution team of researchers advancing the development of probabilistic computers based on magnetic tunnel junctions. His work on spintronics and quantum materials is also supported by the Center for Energy-Efficient Magnonics (CEEMag), an Energy Frontier Research Center supported by the US Department of Energy.
A senior member of the IEEE, Khalili is past chair of the Chicago chapter of the IEEE Magnetics Society, has served as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Nanotechnology Council, and is a member of the IEEE Magnetic Society’s Administrative Committee.
Khalili serves as an associate editor of the Condensed Matter Physics section of the academic journal Frontiers in Physics. He is also a member of the editorial advisory board of the Cell Press journal Newton and of Elsevier’s Physica E: Low-dimensional Systems and Nanostructures.
Khalili received the IEEE Technical Achievement Award during a ceremony on July 7 as part of the 26th IEEE International Conference on Nanotechnology, held in Nanjing, China.