Kristofer Pister

Professor Kris Pister received a B.A. in Applied Physics from UC San Diego in 1986 and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 1989 and 1992, respectively. He taught in the Electrical Engineering Department at UCLA prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in 1996.

Professor Pister developed Smart Dust, a project with the goal of putting a complete sensing/communication platform inside a cubic millimeter. For this project, he was awarded the second annual Alexander Schwarzkopf Prize for Technological Innovation, in 2006, from the I/UCRC Association, for developing and successfully commercializing Smart Dust. He has also focused his energies on synthetic insects, which he has characterized as “basically Smart Dust with legs.”

Dr. Pister is known for his academic work on Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and their simulation (the SUGAR MEMS simulator), his work on Smart Dust, and his membership in the JASON Defense Advisory Group. He received the Alfred F. Sperry Founder Award in 2009 for his “contributions to the science and technology of instrumentation, systems, and automation.” He is a co-Director of the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center (BSAC) and the Ubiquitious Swarm Lab and the founder and current CTO of Dust Networks, a company commercializing the Smart Dust concept.