Quinn Jacobson

Quinn Jacobson is a professor of the practice at the Information Networking Institute (INI) and based in CMU’s Silicon Valley campus. He is creating programs to teach entrepreneurship and execution to the next generation of technical cofounders and strengthen CMU’s engagement with the startup community. His research includes secure distributed systems, neuromorphic computing, and domain-specific accelerators.

Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon University, Jacobson led engineering efforts at several innovative startups, in high-performance distributed software systems and domain-specific hardware accelerators. He cofounded Vibrado Technologies, a venture-backed CMU spinout that created the first truly smart apparel. Before discovering his passion for startups, Jacobson worked on advanced technology development. He developed the world’s first commercially released soft core for FPGAs at Altera, architected the world’s first multi-core SPARC microprocessors at Sun Microsystems, and led the development of one of the first crowdsourced smartphone services at Nokia. He holds more than 70 granted U.S. patents. His work has been presented in many diverse forums, from GEOINT to Hot Chips to the NABC Convention at the NCAA Final Four.