Robert Marano

Adjunct Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering

In 1993, with a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering earned, Professor Marano started his professional career as systems engineering specialist and microwave antenna designer at GE AstroSpace in the Edison Engineering Technical Management Program at GE/Lockheed Martin. He has been lecturing at Cooper Union since 1996, first starting in the immigrant retraining program, lecturing on relational database management systems, Java, C#, and cyber security then in our engineering school’s undergraduate and graduate courses ranging from computer architecture, computer science, engineering management, and engineering design and prototyping. Professor Marano earned his master’s degree in Science with focus on Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, with his thesis on the one of the first novel uses of wavelet computation on digital signal processors.

Today, he serves as a Sr. Practice Manager/Principal Consultant and head of the Americas IoT Solutions team, a part of AWS Professional Services' Global Specialty Practice in Emerging Services. He led a team that delivers our IoT deployments for our customers as well as develop best practices and help our customers and partners deliver connected devices solutions from the edge through to the cloud and visualization & reporting, integrating across IT and OT data sources. Professor Marano started at AWS in 2018 as a Principal Consultant in AWS ProServe, specializing in IoT for our customers in manufacturing, telecoms, media, energy, oil & gas, life sciences, health care, and financial services.

Professor Marano’s experience spans enterprise & telco cloud architecture design & implementation of Big Data and Machine Learning systems; cybersecurity threat analysis, video analytics, IoT, energy analytics, ad analytics; product and engineering strategy and leadership in both established and startup firms.

In the early 2000's, Professor Marano founded Konsilix to provide telcos and enterprises engineering design & implementation services in the areas of Big Data, ML as well as transform their offerings to cloud architectures using SAFe agile management.

In 2015, Professor Marano co-founded Totem Power/Cellular, designed & built its tech & eng team to define & deliver today the future of next generation telco & utility poles, starting with EV charging and 5G telco & IoT base stations. Totem enables the "Enernet" as a software-defined energy storage & IoT hub using AI for efficient energy delivery, and packaged for all to see, and enjoy in everyday spaces.

In 2012, Professor Marano also co-founded The Hackerati which delivered custom SW for Web, Mobile and Big Data/ML & engineering mgmt. Cooper Union students and alumni formed over three-quarters of our staff, which at its height employed more than seventy consultants, designing, and implementing complex engineering solutions for Viacom, Huffington Post, Lockheed Martin, and new startups in the NY metro area.

Professor Marano’s entire career focuses on the rigorous academics and real-world engineering required to deliver highly distributed, integrated hardware and software solutions to help organizations securely collect, analyze, & understand the data driving their businesses, as well assist them to visualize and action data into knowledge.

Professor Marano has more than twenty-five years of engineering experience in product, engineering, sales, and marketing in tech startups, financial services, telcos, and cloud computing companies. He has had the privilege and honor of serving in management roles at both startups & Fortune 500 firms in the US and abroad, eg, AWS, PwC, IBM (RiverSoft & Micromuse), EMC/VMware (Voyence), GE, Lockheed Martin, and Merrill Lynch.

“Teaching remains my equal passion to creating and delivering technology. I have been lecturing at Cooper Union, NYU, and NYIT since 1996 most especially on courses focused on how computers work from the chip on up and the algorithms and designs to scale computing to the cloud, so to speak. Moreover, having founded or served in technology leadership of more than half a dozen software companies, I have lectured undergraduate and graduate entrepreneurship at Cooper Union and NYU. Many of my former students either helped me found startups or founded very successful startups on their own. Peter Cooper’s vision of innovation and entrepreneurship drive my business and academic endeavors. And I still write lots of software and build hardware from NAND gates and transistors on up, thanks to the education I received at Cooper Union.”

Specialties: Distributed computing; IoT, cloud-centric software engineering, Big Data/AI; Product/service business development & marketing, channel management and development, IT & security risk management, SW architecture, agile SW development, value-chain-based competitive analysis, and startup financial planning.

Courses taught: Computer Architecture (ECE251); Advanced Computer Architecture (ECE453); Introduction to Computer Science (CS102); Cloud Computing (ECE465); Engineering and Entrepreneurship (EID365); Global Perspectives in Technology Management (EID372); Advanced Programming Methods (ECE461); Design and Prototyping (ME155); Engineering Design and Problem Solving (EID101).

RPIE courses taught: Introduction to Cyber Security; Java Programming; Introduction to C#; Advanced C#

Related News

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.