Ahmed Amer

Ahmed Amer is an Associate Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at Santa Clara University, where he is director of the Sustainable Systems Laboratory.

He is also a Faculty Scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics (2018–2019 Emerging Issues Fellow), was the 2019–2020 Ignatian Center Bannan Faculty Fellow, and serves on the steering committee of the International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technologies that is hosted annually by his lab at the SCU School of Engineering. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Storage Systems Research Center at UC Santa Cruz, working with Darrell Long, and remains affiliated with its successor, CRSS.

His research spans systems topics — data storage, operating systems, distributed systems, storage reliability, and energy-aware storage — and increasingly their ethical and societal dimensions: data trustworthiness and provenance, privacy, and the ethics of AI. He has chaired the International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technologies (MSST), the Silicon Valley chapter of IEEE’s Society for the Societal Impacts of Technology (SSIT), and the technical program committee of the society’s flagship conference (ISTAS) in 2025. He also serves on the board of the International Association of Computing and Philosophy (IACAP) as well as on the program committee for the association’s annual conference. He is also a scholar of the Aspen Institute’s Aspen Tech Policy Hub. He’s known for reaching for unusual analogies — from ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian creation myths, to dancing robots — to make sense of both technology and its ethics.