Dirk Stroobandt was born in Ghent, Belgium, in 1972. He graduated in 1994 as electrotechnical engineer at Ghent University. In May 1998, he obtained the Ph.D. degree in electrotechnical engineering from the same university. From October 1994 to September 1998, Dirk Stroobandt was research assistant and from October 1998 to September 2002 he was post-doctoral fellow with the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders (Belgium) (F.W.O.). Since October 2002, he is Professor at Ghent University (promotion to Senior Lecturer in 2006 and to Full Professor in 2014), affiliated with the Department of Electronics and Information Systems (ELIS), Computer Systems Lab (CSL). He currently leads the research group HES (Hardware and Embedded Systems) of about 10 people with interests in semi-automatic hardware design methodologies and tools, run-time FPGA reconfiguration, and reconfigurable multiprocessor networks.
Dirk Stroobandt is a member of IEEE, ACM, AIG (Alumni Ghent), and KVIV (Royal Flamish Engineering Association), . He is the inaugural winner of the ACM/SIGDA Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award in Design Automation, June 1999. He also received the `Scientific prize Alcatel Bell’ in 2002. He visited the lab of Prof. Fadi J. Kurdahi at the University of California at Irvine as a researcher from April to July 1997. From July 1999 to June 2000, he visited the group of Prof. Andrew B. Kahng at the Computer Science Department of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) as a post-doctoral researcher.
Dirk Stroobandt initiated and co-organized the International Workshop on System-Level Interconnect Prediction (SLIP) in 1999 and was the General Chair of SLIP 2000. He is still actively involved in this workshop. He was also Special Session Chair, General Chair and Program Chair of IWLS (ACM/IEEE International Workshop on Logic & Synthesis) in 2013, 2014 and 2015 respectively. He is guest editor of two special issues of the IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems on System-Level Interconnect Prediction and a special issue on SLIP for Integration, the VLSI Journal. He is also lead editor of a special issue of the International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing and he has been associate editor of ACM’s TODAES for three years. He is currently associate editor for ACM TRETS (Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems). Dirk Stroobandt is involved in the organisation of several conferences in the field and is reviewer for numerous conferences and journals.
Since 2014, Dirk Stroobandt is chair of the educational committee for the electrical engineering courses at Ghent University. He is also the representative of Ghent University in DSP Valley and member of the Board of DSP Valley.