James Tuck
Professor
ORCiD
Biography
Tuck received his BE (1999) from Vanderbilt University and his MS (2003) and Ph.D. (2007) from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been awarded two IEEE Micro Top Picks Paper Awards, honoring the papers most likely to impact industry. He is a member of Tau Beta Phi, AAAS, and a Senior Member of the IEEE and ACM.
His current research focuses on data storage and computation in DNA. This involves" encoding and decoding for DNA as a communication channel; novel molecular organizations to allow dense and sustainable operation of DNA storage systems; and modeling thermodynamic properties of DNA.
He was named as Interim Department Head of Electrical and Computer Engineering in May 2026. Before that, we served as the Senior Associate Head for Undergraduate Affairs from 2024 to 2026.
Education
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Ph.D.
2007
Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign -
Master's
2003
Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign -
Bachelor's
1999
Computer Engineering
Vanderbilt University, Nashville
Research Focus
Undergraduate Affairs Team
The Undergraduate Affairs team for NC State ECE supports students with academic advising, course planning, and resources to ensure their success throughout the program.
Expert In
Security , Reliability , parallel computing , Microarchitecture , Machine Learning
Involvement
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Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization
Associate Editor -
2026 International Symposium on Computer Architecture
General Co-Chair
Highlighted Awards
Awards & Honors
- NC State University 2022 Outstanding Teacher Award
- ECE Department's Lane Teaching Award in 2018
Recent News
James Tuck and Huiyang Zhou Recieve Outstanding Teacher Award
Posted on April 18, 2022 | Filed Under: Awards and News
Congratulations to ECE faculty members James Tuck and Huiyang Zhou for receiving the Outstanding Teacher Award!
New Twist on DNA Data Storage Lets Users Preview Stored Files
Posted on June 10, 2021 | Filed Under: Research
Researchers in NC State ECE have turned a longstanding challenge in DNA data storage into a useful tool.
New Approach to DNA Data Storage Makes System More Dynamic, Scalable
Posted on June 12, 2020 | Filed Under: Research
A partnership of researchers from ECE and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering are laying out a fundamentally new approach to DNA data storage.
Media Mentions
Nature’s Databank
February 13, 2020
A hurdle that DNA data storage faces is finding a way to retrieve a specific file from a collection of records instead of every file in that collection, however attaching short labels to data sequences only yields 30,000 unique labels. NC State’s James Tuck is leading the solution increasing the number of labels to roughly 900 million.
Boffins create software that is 20 per cent faster
April 6, 2010
The paper with the catch title ‘MMT: Exploiting Fine-Grained Parallelism in Dynamic Memory Management,’ was penned by North Carolina State University (NCSU) researchers Devesh Tiwari, Sanghoon Lee, James Tuck, and Yan Solihin