Dr. Robert (Bob) Colwell joined the Microsystems Technology Office in April 2011 as the Deputy Director.  His interests include architectural and hardware engineering, CPUs, chipsets, buses, memories, and electronics.

Before joining DARPA, Dr. Colwell worked as a consultant, specializing in general computer HW/SW, for industry and academia.  From 1990 – 2001, Dr. Colwell worked for Intel Corporation and served as Chief Architect (IA32) responsible for all of Intel's Pentium CPU architecture efforts.  He also initiated and led Intel's Pentium 4 CPU development.  In 1997, Dr. Colwell was named an Intel Fellow, the highest technical grade at the company.

As a member of the technical staff at Bell Labs from 1977 to 1980, Dr. Colwell worked on the BellMac series of microprocessors.

Dr. Colwell has been a recipient of the Eckert-Mauchly Award for “outstanding achievements in the design and implementation of industry-changing microarchitectures, and for significant contributions to the RISC/CISC architecture debate.  In addition, Dr. Colwell was elected to IEEE Fellow and the National Academy of Engineering for “contributions to turning novel computer architecture concepts into viable, cutting-edge commercial processors.”

From 2006 – 2009, Dr. Colwell was selected as member of Information Systems Advanced Technology (ISAT) and co-chaired Machine Learning on Multicore in 2009.  Having written more than two dozen publications and one book, Dr. Colwell has been an invited speaker by the Department of Defense, Google and multiple universities.  He is the inventor/co-inventor on 40 patents and is a recipient of the Carnegie-Mellon Distinguished Alumni Fellows Award and an Alumni Achievement Award from the University of Pittsburgh.

Dr. Colwell received a Bachelors of Science, Electrical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh, and both his Masters of Science, Electrical Engineering  and Doctor of Philosophy from Carnegie-Mellon University.