Dr. Lisa Su

Dr. Lisa Su

Technical Leadership Abie Award

Lisa is the Chief Executive Officer and President of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). AMD is powering the future of high-performance computing and visualization through its microprocessors, APUs, and graphics chips.

Through Lisa’s remarkable leadership as a business executive and electrical engineer, AMD went from struggling to having its strongest performance in the 50-year history of the company in 2019 after bringing to market several leading-edge technologies. Today, AMD has made a name for itself by powering high-performance solutions across PCs, data centers and gaming with industry-leading partners like Amazon, Apple, Google, HPE, Lenovo, Microsoft and Sony.

Lisa was first appointed President and CEO of AMD in October 2014, after joining the company in 2012 and holding the roles of Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President of AMD’s Global Business Units. Early in her career, Lisa worked at Texas Instruments, IBM, and Freescale Semiconductor in engineering and management positions.

“When you grow up as a tech person — and I spent my career in semiconductors — there aren’t that many large US semiconductor companies. So, I was really excited to become CEO,” Lisa told CNN Business about leading AMD.

Lisa is known for her work developing silicon-on-insulator semiconductor manufacturing technologies and more efficient semiconductor chips during her time as vice president of IBM’s Semiconductor Research and Development Center.

AMD Turnaround

Lisa’s technical and business leadership has received various prestigious accolades, including being named one of the World’s Greatest Leaders by Fortune and listed as one of the World’s 50 Best CEOs by Barron’s. In 2019, Lisa was named one of Fortune’s “Most Powerful Women in Business” and Harvard Business Review’s #26 “Best-Performing CEOs in the World”.

When Lisa joined AMD, the company was on the brink of bankruptcy — her leadership and deep subject matter expertise quickly changed AMD’s direction, and refocused its efforts around its core competencies of CPUs and GPUs. Lisa led AMD to double-down on building technology for high-performance computing applications and set AMD up to develop crucial next-generation technology.

Lisa is credited with leading AMD to diversify beyond the PC market, including working with Microsoft and Sony to place AMD chips in Xbox One and PS4 game consoles. Today, AMD has secured a strong foothold in the server and PC CPU and GPU markets under Lisa’s guidance, with their third-generation Ryzen and second-generation EPYC CPUs beating Intel CPUs in terms of performance.

Since Lisa first took on the role of CEO, the company’s shares have gone up more than 1,300% – persevering amid US-China tensions and, more recently, disruptions caused by COVID-19.

Impact on Women

What Lisa has achieved has moved mountains for women in technology. She has shown that women can repeatedly do high impact technical research and product development and simultaneously assume exceptional leadership roles  and show stellar success in all areas.  

Lisa supports women graduate students of nanotechnology through a recently established Lisa Su Fellowship Fund at MIT, with the aim of helping students who do not yet qualify for doctoral fellowships but require support to complete their studies and launch their careers. 

Lisa currently serves on the Board of Directors of Cisco Inc. and the U.S. Semiconductor Industry Association, as well as serving as the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA). 

In 2018, she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, was named “Businessperson of the Year” by Fortune Magazine, and received the prestigious Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award. In 2019, Lisa was included in The Bloomberg 50 list of people who defined the year. In 2020, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Science. 

The Abie Award Selection Committee commended Lisa:

— For her astounding turnaround of AMD

–For her sustained technical work in the areas of semiconductor manufacturing technologies and high-performance computing and graphic technologies

— For her continued leadership and financial support of women seeking technical careers  

Lisa in 2020 

Lisa has bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  

To learn more about her work, visit her AMD leadership page.  

Here is Lisa’s most recent article in Fortune.

You can follow Lisa Su on Twitter. 

Thank you to Capital One Services, LLC, Sponsor of the 2020 Technical Leadership Abie Award. 

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