Brief Biography

Valeria Bertacco is the Mary Lou Dorf Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan. Her research interests are in the area of electronic design automation and computer architecture. Throughout her career, she has contributed novel solutions in design validation and reliability, hardware-security assurance, and the design of specialized architectures for graph algorithms and machine learning. Most recently she has been focusing on scalable design solutions for mobility applications.

From 2018 to 2023, Prof. Bertacco was the Director of the Applications Driving Architectures (ADA) Research Center, funded by a consortium of semiconductor companies and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), whose mission was to reignite computing systems design and innovation for the 2030-2040s decades through specialized hardware heterogeneity. Since 2023, she has led the MAVERIC collaborative, the University of Michigan's initiative to advance semiconductor research and education, supporting the automotive semiconductor segment and widening the global supply chain through technology solutions.

Valeria joined the University of Michigan in 2003. She currently serves as the Vice Provost for Engaged Learning, supporting all co-curricular engagements and international partnerships for the institution and facilitating the work of several central units focused on applied learning. As of 2026, her team launched the university's Co-Curricular Transcript to support students' reporting of their engaged-learning activities.

Research interests

Valeria's research interests are centered in the creation of novel solutions that enable the sustainable development of silicon systems, by making them more energy-efficient, performant and significantly cheaper to design and manufacture. Throughout her career she has worked on algorithmic and heuristic solutions to deliver low-cost and effective functional and formal correctness in the design of complex digital systems, reliability from silicon failures, and protection from hardware security attacks. Her solutions span both design-time methodologies and runtime solutions that augment the system with small hardware components monitoring and detecting situations of concern.

Most recently her research focus has been on the design of specialized hardware to accelerate key future applications, ranging from map-reduce applications, to graph-based applications, and to explainable artificial intelligence kernels, with operating frameworks spanning both server and server-edge distributed computation. Her work on hardware security has gained focus in augmenting her solutions with data privacy guarantees.

Extended Biography

Valeria Bertacco is the Mary Lou Dorf Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan. Her research interests are in the area of electronic design automation and computer architecture. Throughout her career, she has contributed novel solutions in design validation and reliability, hardware-security assurance, and the design of specialized architectures for graph algorithms and machine learning.

From 2018 to 2023, Prof. Bertacco was the Director of the Applications Driving Architectures (ADA) Research Center, funded by a consortium of semiconductor companies and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The Center engaged the work of 10 US academic institutions and over 130 Ph.D. student researchers. Since 2023, she leads the MAVERIC collaborative, the University of Michigan's initiative to advance semiconductor research and education. The MAVERIC collaborative engages 100 UM faculty members whose research work spans materials, devices, circuits, architectures, and microelectronics systems. Its mission is to advance innovation in this space, supporting the automotive segment in its accelerated growth and widening the global supply chain through technology solutions.

At Michigan, she also serves as the Vice Provost for Engaged Learning, supporting all international partnerships and co-curricular engagements. In the international space, her initiatives have expanded the participation by U-M students in study-abroad experiences, bringing the university to rank #1 among U.S. public institutions by number of domestic students completing an international education experience. Domestically, the primary engaged learning partners reside within the State of Michigan, and especially within the City of Detroit. In her Vice Provost role, Prof. Bertacco also facilitates the work of nine central units focused on applied learning, whose goals range from supporting the University's ROTC programs, to the promotion of the arts in research universities, to journalism, and to increasing the participation of gender minorities in STEM fields.

She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University. Prof. Bertacco joined the University of Michigan in 2003, after working as a research engineer for Systems Science Inc., and Synopsys from 1997 to 2001.