Stephen A. Edwards received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1992, and the M.S. and Ph.D degrees, also in Electrical Engineering, from the University of California, Berkeley in 1994 and 1997 respectively. He is currently an associate professor in the Computer Science Department of Columbia University in New York, which he joined in 2001 after a three-year stint with Synopsys, Inc., in Mountain View, California.

Professor Edwards and his group work on the boundary between hardware and software systems on projects that aim to push the limit of what the combination can provide, including parallel systems whose function remains predictable, programming languages with predictable timing, synthesizing efficient hardware from software-like specifications, and building hardware dedicated to speeding up and reducing the power consumption of large database systems.