54th Faculty Senate Chair and Vice Chair

The members of Stanford’s 54th Senate have elected Ruth O'Hara, Director, Spectrum, Senior Associate Dean, Research and Lowell W. and Josephine Q. Berry Professor, as its Chair for the Senate’s 2021-22 year, and Mark Horowitz, Yahoo! Founders Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Computer Science, as the Senate’s Vice Chair. Their one-year term of office begins Fall Quarter of 2021. 

Chair, Ruth O'Hara    

Dr. O’Hara is the Director of Spectrum, the Senior Associate Dean for Research in the Stanford University School of Medicine, and the Lowell W. and Jacqueline Q. Berry Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Her research examines the impact of sleep architecture on cognitive and psychiatric symptoms across the lifespan, with a particular emphasis on the role of sleep in neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders. Dysregulated sleep has profound implications for public health and many sleep disorders can be treated. A significant focus of Dr. O’Hara’s work is improving sleep in order to alleviate psychiatric symptoms. Dr. O’Hara served on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM 5), which provides diagnostic classification for the field of psychiatry, and is currently Vice Chair of the American Association of Sleep Medicine Career Development Awards Committee.

Vice Chair, Mark Horowitz  

Professor Horowitz initially focused on designing high-performance digital systems by combining work in computer-aided design tools, circuit design, and system architecture. During this time, he built a number of early RISC microprocessors, and contributed to the design of early distributed shared memory multiprocessors. In 1990, Dr. Horowitz took leave from Stanford to help start Rambus Inc., a company designing high-bandwidth memory interface technology. After returning in 1991, his research group pioneered many innovations in high-speed link design, and many of today’s high speed link designs are designed by his former students or colleagues from Rambus.

In the 2000s he started a long collaboration with Prof. Levoy on computation photography, that included work that led to the Lytro camera. Dr. Horowitz's current research interests are quite broad and span using EE and CS analysis methods to problems in neuro and molecular biology to creating new agile design methodologies for analog and digital VLSI circuits. He remains interested in learning new things, and building interdisciplinary teams.