For other people named John Hennessy, see John Hennessy.
John LeRoy Hennessy, the founder of MIPS Computer Systems Inc., is currently serving as the 10th President of Stanford University. He earned his Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Villanova University, and his Master's degree and Ph.D. in computer science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Hennessy became a Stanford faculty member in 1977. In 1984, he used his sabbatical year to found MIPS Computer Systems Inc. to commercialize his research in RISC processors.
In 1987, he became the Willard and Inez Kerr Bell Endowed Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Hennessy served as director of Stanford's Computer System Laboratory (1989-1993), a research center run by Stanford's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments. He was chair of the Department of Computer Science (1994-1996) and Dean of the School of Engineering (1996-1999).
Hennessy and David A. Patterson have written two well-known books about computer architecture, Computer Organization and Design: the Hardware/Software Interface (3 editions; latest is ISBN 1-55860-604-1) and Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (4 editions, latest is ISBN 0-12-370490-1). They have been widely used as textbooks for graduate and undergraduate courses since 1990.
In 1997 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
In 1999, Stanford President Gerhard Casper appointed Hennessy to succeed Condoleezza Rice as Provost of Stanford University.
When Casper stepped down to focus on teaching in 2000, the Stanford Board of Trustees named Hennessy to succeed Casper as president. As Stanford's president, Hennessy earns an annual salary of $566,581.
He joined the board of Google, in exchange for 65,000 shares of the company; at the time of Google's IPO, his shares were worth over $7 million. He is also a board member of Cisco Systems, Inc.[1], Atheros Communications[2] and the Daniel Pearl Foundation.