Digital Business Era: Stretch Your Boundaries

Prith Banerjee is executive vice president and chief technology officer at Schneider Electric, as well as a member of the executive committee, which reports to the chairman and CEO. In this role, Prith is responsible for driving innovation and technology differentiation and coordinating the R&D activities of the company across its five businesses with 11,000 R&D personnel and a €1.2 billion R&D investment. Previously, Prith was managing director of global technology R&D at Accenture; chief technology officer and executive vice president of ABB, a power and automation company in Zurich, Switzerland; senior vice president of research at HP and director of HP Labs; dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago; the Walter P. Murphy professor and chairman of electrical and computer engineering at Northwestern University; and professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prith also founded AccelChip, a developer of products for electronic design automation, which was sold to Xilinx Inc. in 2006, and was founder, chairman, and chief scientist of Binachip Inc., a developer of products in electronic design automation.

Prith’s research interests are in electronic design automation and parallel computing, and he has published or presented nearly 350 research papers in journals and at conferences. He has also supervised 37 PhD students. Prith currently serves on the board of directors of Cray, the technical advisory board of Cypress, and the steering committee of the Industrial Internet Consortium and has previously served on board of the Anita Borg Institute, the computer science board of the National Academy of Engineering, and the technical advisory boards of Ambit, Atrenta, and Calypto. He was named one of Fast Company’s 100 Top Business Leaders in 2009 and one the Most Creative People in Business in 2014. Prith is a fellow of the AAAS, ACM, and IEEE and a recipient of the 1996 ASEE Terman award and the 1987 NSF Presidential Young Investigator award. He holds a BTech (president’s gold medalist) in electronics engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and an MS and PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.