David A. Patterson (NAE/NAS) is a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, a distinguished engineer at Google, vice chair of RISC-V International, and director of the RISC-V International Open Source Laboratory.

His most successful research projects were likely reduced instruction set computers (RISC), redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID), and network of workstations (NOW), all of which helped lead to billion-dollar industries.  

His teaching was honored with the ACM Karlstrom Award and the IEEE Mulligan Medal. A past president of ACM and past chair of the Computer Research Association, he received Distinguished Service Awards from both. He also received the Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science, and Diversifying Computing. He won the 2017 ACM A.M Turing Award and the 2020 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, both shared with John Hennessy.

He received his BA in mathematics, and MS and PhD in computer science, all from UCLA.