Professor John Hennessy FREng

Director of Knight-Hennessy Scholar’s Program, Stanford University

John Hennessy is a pioneering computer scientist and engineer, who has founded technology companies, and as President of Stanford University, has advocated constructive relationships between academia and industry in order to bring the fruits of academic research more rapidly to market.

He was a pioneer of the RISC (reduced instruction set computer) design strategy for central processing unit architecture, which he successfully commercialised with the creation of MIPS Computer Systems.