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Jonathan Haines, 2024 Alumni Engagement Medal Award recipient

Engineering Alumni Awards

2024 Alumni Engagement Medal Award recipient

Title and employer: Director, Embedded Software, Western Digital

Current city: Boulder, Colorado

Professional background

Jonathan Haines earned his BS in electrical and computer engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo and his master’s in electrical engineering, with an emphasis in communication theory, at ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä Boulder. After working as a research assistant on digital signal processing and atmospheric radar, Haines worked at a military contracting company writing software before moving to the storage industry. Other than a few years writing firmware for telecommunications, Haines has been in storage for his entire career. His technical career has included  writing software to make electrical controls and data transformations happen. He began as a firmware coder, and then revolved through firmware architecture, program management and now personnel management. The technology that Haines helped develop has helped hard disk drives continue the amazing storage density growth that so much of our world depends on. In the process, he  has authored over 50 U.S. patents. Haines feels lucky to have experienced such a rich mix of science and engineering in industry, and he is enthusiastic about sharing his experience in embedded systems engineering as he continues to work in the storage industry and recruits the next generation of storage engineers.

Contributions to the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering over the past year

Haines has led HDD teardowns for the IEEE chapter and the Business and Engineering Women in Technology program at ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä Boulder, providing technical and business correlations between university studies and some of the fascinating problems in engineering development. Haines teaches multiple courses at ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä Boulder, participated in the Society of Women Engineers Mocktail event, and most recently joined the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering External Advisory Board in 2022.