Bashir Al-Hashimi

Bashir Mohammed Ali Al-Hashimi, CBE, FRS, FREng, FIEEE, FIET, FBCS (born 5 January 1961) is a computer engineering researcher, academic, entrepreneur and higher education leader. He is Vice President (Research & Innovation) and ARM Professor of Computer Engineering at King's College London in the United Kingdom. He was the co-founder and co-director of the ARM-ECS Research Centre, an industry-university collaboration partnership involving the University of Southampton and ARM. He is actively involved in promoting science and engineering for young people and regularly contributes to engineering higher education and skills national debates. He is the chair of the Engineers 2030 working group, a national campaign overseen by the National Engineering Policy Centre and led by the UK Royal Academy of Engineering. The campaign centres around accelerating change and the future workforce of engineering.

Early life and education
Bashir was born in Baghdad, Iraq and he came to the UK in 1978 to study and went to the University of Bath where he obtained an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering. He got a MSc in electronics engineering from the University of Cardiff in 1986 and his PhD degree (1989) was received from the University of York. He worked in the electronics industry following his PhD in 1989 and joined the Department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at University of Southampton in 1999.

Research and academic career
Bashir focuses on low power design and test of integrated electronic circuits and systems. His research focuses on understanding the interaction between hardware and software in constrained computing systems such as in mobile and embedded applications and how such interactions can be used through theory and experiment to achieve systems energy optimisation and enhanced hardware dependability. He has made theoretical and experimental contributions to the field of hardware-software co-design, low power semiconductor chips test and test-data compression of digital integrated circuits  and  energy-harvesting computing.

In 2009, he established the Pervasive Systems Centre. He has published 6 books (including Many-Core Computing: Hardware and Software, IET (2019) and nearly 400 referred technical papers.

He was the project director for PRiME, an EPSRC funded five-year programme (2013–2018) researching in the areas of low power, highly-parallel, reconfigurable and dependable computing and verified software design.

He was also the project director for the EPSRC funded Holistic battery-free electronics project, aiming to develop ultra-energy-efficient electronic systems for emerging applications including mobile digital health and autonomous wireless monitoring in environmental and industrial settings.This project addressed one of the UK Electronics Design community Grand Challenges, “Batteries Not Included”. The project has played an important role in shaping and influencing the academic research agenda worldwide in powering Internet of Things devices in a sustainable way.

He has held various academic leadership roles, starting with serving as Deputy Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), University of Southampton. In 2014, he was appointed Executive Dean of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering at Southampton and in 2018, as Executive Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, where he remains a Visiting Professor at the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS). In 2020, he joined King's College London to lead the Faculty of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, leading the change to Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences at King's.

Awards, honours and fellowhips

 * In 2023, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.
 * Elected in 2023 as a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.
 * In 2020, he was awarded the IET Faraday Medal, formally signing the register at a ceremony in October 2022.
 * Bashir was also appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2018 Queen's Birthday Honours for services to computer engineering and to industry.
 * In 2014, he received the Royal Society Wolfson Fellowship for his work on energy-efficient and reliable many-core computing systems.
 * Elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, 2013.
 * In 2012, the European Electronic Design Automation Association awarded him a DATE Fellowship for leadership and outstanding contributions to electronic design, automation and test.
 * In 2012, he was awarded the Outstanding Service Award by the IEEE Council for Electronic Design Automation (CEDA) for serving as the General Chair of DATE 2012.
 * Elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2009.

Appointments
Bashir is an Elected Trustee of the Royal Academy of Engineering Board and completed in 2023 a term as chair of the Academy's Awards Committee. He is a Board Director of the ERA Foundation and a UK Electronics Skills Foundation (UKESF) Board Trustee and Director.

He was a member of the Research England Expanding Excellence in England (E3) Fund Assessment Panel and he served as a panel member on the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 and the REF 2021 Engineering Panel.

He was a Trustee of King's College London Mathematics School, completing his term in 2023.

Personal life
Bashir is married to May and they have three daughters: Sara, Haneen and Zahara.