David A. Patterson has been teaching computer architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, since joining the faculty in 1977, and holds the Pardee Chair of Computer Science. His teaching has been honored by the ACM and the University of California. In 2000 he won the James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal from IEEE "for inspirational teaching through the development of creative curricula and teaching methodology, for important textbooks, and for effective integration of education and research missions." Patterson has also received the 1995 IEEE Technical Achievement Award for contributions to RISC and shared the 1999 IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Award for contributions to RAID. In 2000 he shared the IEEE John von Neumann Medal with John Hennessy "for creating a revolution in computer architecture through their exploration, popularization, and commercialization of architectural innovations." Patterson is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is a fellow of both the ACM and the IEEE. In the past, he has been chair of the CS division in the EECS department at Berkeley, the ACM SIG in computer architecture, and the Computing Research Association.

At Berkeley, Patterson led the design and implementation of RISC I, likely the first VLSI Reduced Instruction Set Computer. This research became the foundation of the SPARC architecture, currently used by Sun Microsystems, Fujitsu, and others. He was a leader of the Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) project, which led to high-performance storage systems from many companies. He was also involved in the Network of Workstations (NOW) project, which led to cluster technology used by Internet companies. These projects earned three dissertation awards from the ACM. His current research project is called Recovery Oriented Computing (ROC), which is developing techniques for building dependable, maintainable, and scalable Internet services.