Oral History of Kwabena Boahen

Interviewed by Doug Fairbairn on 2021-06-22 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum

Mr. Boahen is a professor of Bioengineering and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He was born in 1964 in Ghana. His father was a professor of history at the University of Ghana and a very humble man. He wanted his children to be the same.

As a child, Kwabena always enjoyed building and experimenting with things such as microscopes and electric motors. His parents were from different groups within the country and spoke different languages. As a result, the common language in the family home was English. He went off to a boarding school founded by Methodist Missionaries when he was 12. While there he won a national science fair competition for a corn planting machine which he and a friend had developed.

His father has spent a sabbatical at Johns Hopkins University and that opened up the opportunity for Kwabena to study there. While there, he was introduced to how the brain worked and the concept that neural networks represented an alternative approach to computing. He took a course in VLSI design in his junior year and designed an analog approach to neuromorphic computing. He was using course notes and ideas coming from Carver Mead’s class at Caltech.

These studies eventually led to his attending Caltech for graduate school where he earned a PhD under Carver Mead. He entered in 1990 and received his degree in 1996. His focus remained on neuromorphic computing…using an understanding of the human brain to develop more efficient computing elements. The target application was a silicon retina. Kwabena goes into great detail describing his research work and combining learning from the computing and biology domains.

After earning his PhD, he became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. In 2005 he left to join Stanford where he was at the time of the interview. At Stanford he directs Stanford’s Brains in Silicon Lab where he continues his work on melding the worlds of brains, biology and silicon.

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Catalog Number: 102792243
Lot Number: X9493.2021