Larry is founding Dean of the School of Engineering at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. There, he leads the faculty, staff and students in their mission to educate tomorrow’s technology leaders and develop scientific and technological breakthroughs with great societal impact.

Larry was raised in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and the DC suburbs, and went to high school in Bethesda, MD. His early interest in electric cars, led him into electrical engineering at Cornell, and work with the late Professor Joseph Rosson, who had one of the early electric car research groups in the country. Later at Cornell, he became interested in microelectronics technology, which he has pursued ever since. After graduation, Larry spent 15 years at Hughes Research Laboratories (now HRL Laboratories) in Malibu, CA where he designed and led the development of a variety of microelectronics technologies for communications and defense applications. While at HRL, he picked up a PhD (UCLA ‘86) and an MBA (UCLA ‘96).

Larry joined the faculty at UC San Diego in 1996 where he was inaugural holder of the Communications Industry Chair. He was Director of the UCSD Center for Wireless Communications from 2001-2007. In 2004-2005 Larry and his family (wife Carole ’79, daughter Hannah now 22, and son Erik now 20) spent a sabbatical year in the Netherlands, where he was a visiting Professor at TU Delft. Larry became chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCSD in 2007, and joined Brown in 2011. He has published over 300 papers, co-authored several books and has over 40 US patents.

Larry is leading a major growth initiative for the School of Engineering at Brown, including a $160M fundraising campaign, a doubling of the space available for the School over the next decade, and a 40% growth of the faculty and graduate program.

At the time of our 40th reunion, Larry continues at Brown as Sorensen Family Dean of the School of Engineering. In 2018, he lost his wife of 37 years Carole Larson (nee Freedman) - also Cornell '79 - after a long battle with cancer. Carole and Larry met at Cornell as freshmen in 1975, and one of their first dates was the famous Grateful Dead concert in Barton Hall on May 8, 1977.