Randy Howard Katz received his undergraduate degree from Cornell (1976), and his M.S. (1978) and Ph.D. (1980) degrees from Berkeley. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1983.

Since 1996 he has been the United Microelectronics Corporation Distinguished Professor. On January 1, 2018, he was appointed as the Vice Chancellor for Research at Berkeley. He is a Fellow of the ACM, the IEEE, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He has published over 350 refereed papers, book chapters, and books. He has supervised 57 M.S. theses and 46 Ph.D. dissertations. He has received four test-of-time and sixteen best paper awards. His recognitions include the Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Jim and Donna Gray Faculty Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award, the ASEE Terman Award, the IEEE Mulligan Education Medal, the ACM Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, the IEEE Johnson Information Storage Award, the ACM Sigmobile Outstanding Contributor Award, the Outstanding Alumni Award of the Computer Science Division, the CRA Outstanding Service Award, and the Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Decoration.

In the late 1980s, with Berkeley colleagues, he developed Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID). At DARPA in 1993-1994, he established whitehouse.gov and connected the White House to the Internet. His current research interests are data analytics from distributed sensors and actuators and Smart Cities through Intelligent Energy/Buildings/Transportation Infrastructures.