Carver Mead

Carver Andress Mead (born May 1, 1934) is an American scientist and engineer who taught at the California Institute of Technology for more than forty years, serving as the Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science. He designed the first gallium arsenide field-effect transistor in 1966 and, working with Lynn Conway from 1975, co-authored the textbook Introduction to VLSI Systems, which reshaped how integrated circuits are designed and taught. In the 1980s he pioneered neuromorphic electronic systems that model biological sensory processing, work that influenced later technologies such as Synaptics touchpads. He founded or co-founded more than twenty companies and received the National Medal of Technology in 2002 and the Kyoto Prize in 2022.