Dr. Michael Lee Bushnell’s interest in electrical engineering began when he was a young child, as his father gifted him an electric train set from the 1920s. The components and engineering behind the toy sparked his curiosity in the industry, and he went on to receive a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975. After working in the field for seven years, he attended Carnegie Mellon University, from whom he earned a Master of Science in computer engineering and Doctor of Philosophy in electrical engineering in 1983 and 1986, respectively. The following two years were spent as a Henry Rutgers Research Fellow and, in 1992, he completed a Trustee’s Research Fellowship for Distinguished Young Scholars.
Since 2008, Dr. Bushnell has excelled as a co-founder and chief technology officer of Spectral Design & Test, Inc., located in Somerville, New Jersey. Focusing his efforts on ultra-large scale integrated circuits at the analog or digital level, as well as the testing and synthesizing of those circuits, he is impressively fluent in numerous computer programming languages. Overall, Dr. Bushnell is a pioneering electrical engineer with more than 45 years of experience to his credit. He holds eight U.S. patents and two European patents and currently has a patent pending in robust delay fault built-in self-testing.
Prior to attaining his current position, Dr. Bushnell served as a technical staff member of the Advanced System Development Department for Applicon, Inc., a senior systems programmer for Instron Corporation, and an associate engineer in the Design Automation Department for Honeywell. The bulk of his career, however, was as a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He held this position from 1986 to 2013, at which time he was named professor emeritus. During this time, he also served the CAIP Research Center, Wireless Information Networks Laboratory and Rutgers Center for Operations Research at Rutgers University’s School of Engineering.
Most notably, Dr. Bushnell has been recognized as a prolific writer and editor, having contributed 29 journal articles to scientific publications, 78 conference papers in proceedings, 29 technical reports, and 56 invited presentations at universities, conferences and corporations. The author of “Design Automation” in 1988, he has co-authored three additional texts between 1991 and 2000 and was a co-publisher of “Method and System of Dynamic Power Cutoff for Active Leakage Reduction in Circuits” in 2007.
For his efforts, Dr. Bushnell earned the 2008 Fellow Award from the IEEE, who also named him a lifetime fellow. He received the 1990 Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, was named among Leading Academics and Industrial Researchers by Top 100 Magazine in 2019, and earned a myriad of awards for his written works.
