Dr. Cowan received the B.A.Sc. degree from the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada in 1999, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University, New York, NY, in 2001 and 2005, respectively. During his graduate studies, he interned with Philips Research, Briarcliff Manor, NY, and as an undergraduate with Research in Motion in Waterloo, Motorola in Toronto, and Nortel in Ottawa.

In 2005, he joined the Communications Technology Department at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. His research activities included CMOS circuits for high-speed communications, design for manufacturability, and circuits for the measurement of process variability. In 2007, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, QC, Canada, where he is a Professor in the VLSI research group. 

At Columbia, Dr. Cowan was a co-recipient of Electrical Engineering’s Jacob Millman award for the two most outstanding teaching assistants in 2001, and a recipient of the Dean’s Award of Extraordinary Teaching Assistant in 2001, 2002, and 2003. In 2003, he was a recipient of Analog Device’s Outstanding Student Designer Award. He was the 2005 recipient of Columbia’s Eliahu I. Jury award for outstanding achievement by a graduate student in the areas of systems, communications, or signal processing.