Dr. Josiah Hester is the Breed Chair of Design, Segal Faculty Fellow, and Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering at Northwestern University. He designs and deploys tiny computers that last for decades, supporting applications in sustainability and healthcare. 

Dr. Hester directs Ka Moamoa, a research lab exploring energy efficient computing in the context of global scale applications. They explore and develop new hardware designs, systems, interaction techniques, tools, and programming abstractions so that developers can easily design, debug, and deploy tiny energy harvesting computers that work despite frequent power failures, constrained resources, and unpredictable conditions.

He works towards a sustainable future for computing informed by his Native Hawaiian (Kanaka maoli) heritage and applies his work in the field of intermittent computing to large-scale sensing for sustainability and conservation, health wearables, and interactive devices. His work is supported by multiple grants from the NSF, NIH, DARPA, and 3M.

Dr. Hester was named a Sloan Fellow in Computer Science and won the NSF CAREER Award in 2022. He was also named to Popular Science’s Brilliant 10, the AISES Most Promising Scientist, and won a 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award in 2021.