System of a Down, sometimes shortened to System and abbreviated as SOAD, is an Armenian-American heavy metal band from Glendale, California, formed in 1994.
 The band currently consists of Serj Tankian (lead vocals, keyboards), Daron Malakian (vocals, guitar), Shavo Odadjian (bass, backing vocals) and John Dolmayan (drums).
Nasir Memon is a computer scientist based in Brooklyn, New York.
 Memon is a professor and chair of the New York University Tandon School of Engineering computer science and engineering department and affiliate faculty at the computer science department in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.
 He is also the Department Head of NYU Tandon Online, the online learning unit of the school.
 He introduced cyber security studies to New York University Tandon School of Engineering, making it one of the first schools to implement the program at the undergraduate level.
 Memon holds twelve patents in image compression and security.
 He is the founding director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Security and Privacy (CRISSP) and CRISSP Abu Dhabi.
 In 2002, Memon founded Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW), an annual conference where tens of thousands of students compete in events and learn skills in cyber security Memon is also co-founder of Digital Assembly, a software company that develops digital forensics and data recovery and Vivic, a company that produces malware detection software.
 Memon has published over 250 articles in journals and conferences and has contributed to articles regarding cyber security in magazines such as "Crain’s New York Business", "Fortune", and "USA Today".
 His research has been featured in "NBC Nightly News", "The New York Times", "MIT Review", "Wired.Com", and "New Science Magazine".
Paul A. Kottman (born 1970) is a comparatist, literary critic and scholar whose recent work belongs to the tradition of Aesthetic philosophy and anthropological philosophy.
 He is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where he is a member of the Committee on Liberal Studies, and is affiliated with the Philosophy Department.
 He holds the Abilitazione, Professore Ordinario in Filosofia, Estetica (Professor of Philosophy, Aesthetics) in Italy.
 He has held Visiting Professorships at the University del Piemonte Orientale, (2006); the University of Tokyo (2011-12); the Università degli studi di Verona; Instituto per gli studi filosofici, Naples; and the International Chair in Political Languages, Dipartimento di Politiche Pubbliche e Scelte Colletive (POLIS).
 He has held a fellowship at Internationales Kolleg Morphomata, Universität zu Köln, and is Full Professor of Philosophy (Aesthetics), Italy National Scientific Committee.
 He is also the editor of a new book series at Stanford University Press, Square One: First Order Questions in the Humanities, is on the editorial board of "Cultura della Modernità" (Edizioni ETS, Italy), and the advisory boards of Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism and the Arts (Columbia University Press) and Corpus: Filosofie e sapere (Paparo Edizioni, Italy)
Paul Boghossian is Silver professor of philosophy at New York University in the NYU Department of Philosophy, where he was Chair of the Department for ten years (1994–2004) and responsible for building it into one of the top philosophy programs in the world.
 His research interests include epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.
 He is Director of the New York Institute of Philosophy and Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham.
Sundeep Rangan is an Associate professor at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, where he also serves as the director of NYU Wireless.
 He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2016 "for contributions to orthogonal frequency division multiple access cellular communication systems".
 Dr. Rangan received his B.A.Sc.
 at the University of Waterloo, Canada and the M.Sc.
 and Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, all in Electrical Engineering.
 He has held postdoctoral appointments at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and Bell Labs.
 In 2000, he co-founded (with four others) Flarion Technologies, a spin off of Bell Labs, that developed Flash OFDM, the first cellular OFDM data system and pre-cursor to 4G cellular systems including LTE and WiMAX.
 In 2006, Flarion was acquired by Qualcomm Technologies.
 Dr. Rangan was a Director of Engineering at Qualcomm involved in OFDM infrastructure products.
 He joined the ECE department at NYU Tandon (formerly NYU Polytechnic) in 2010.
 His research interests are in wireless communications, signal processing, information theory and control theory.
Hannah Ginsborg is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of California, Berkeley.
 She received a B.A. in Philosophy and Modern Languages (French) from the University of Oxford in 1980 and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1989.
 Her education included a year in Paris (1978-1979) studying logic and philosophy at the Université de Paris-I, and a year in Berlin (1985-1986) affiliated with the Freie Universität.
 Since 1988 she has been teaching at the University of California, Berkeley.
 In 2004-2005 she was a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
 She spent the academic year 2010-2011 as a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and the fall of 2014 as a Visiting Research Professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich.
Rodney Benson is an American sociologist and professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.
 He is also an affiliated faculty member in the NYU Department of Sociology and has been a visiting scholar or invited lecturer at universities in France (Institut d’etudes politiques, Toulouse; Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales and CELSA-Sorbonne, Paris), Germany (Universities of Bremen, Munich, and Weimar), Denmark (Copenhagen Business School, Roskilde University), Finland (University of Helsinki), and Norway (Universities of Oslo and Bergen).
 Before joining the NYU faculty, he was an assistant professor of international communications and sociology at the American University of Paris.
 He holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.
Myles W. Jackson (born Paterson, New Jersey on 25 November 1964) is currently the Albert Gallatin Research Excellence Professor of the History of Science at New York University-Gallatin, Professor of History of the Faculty of Arts and Science of New York University, Professor of the Division of Medical Bioethics of NYU-Langone School of Medicine, Faculty Affiliate of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy, NYU School of Law, and Director of Science and Society of the College of Arts and Science at NYU.
 He was the inaugural Dibner Family Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Polytechnic Institute of New York University from 2007 to 2012.
 The chair is named after Bern Dibner (1897 – 1988), an electrical engineer, industrialist, historian of science and technology and alumnus of Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn.
Thomas Nagel ( ; born July 4, 1937) is an American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University in the NYU Department of Philosophy, where he has taught since 1980.
 His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics.
Robert Fowkes was born in Harrison, New York.
 He received his B.A. in 1934 from New York University (NYU), with majors in German and Latin, and his M.A. from NYU a year later.
 He held a fellowship at the University of Bonn (1936–37).
 He received his Ph.D. in 1947 from Columbia University.
 Fowkes began teaching at NYU in 1938 as an instructor in German.
 He later became head of the German Department (1957–1968).
 He retired from NYU in 1978, but continued as Professor Emeritus, lecturing on Avestan, Old Irish, Gothic, Hittite, and other languages, until the 1990s.
 He also held a Guggenheim Fellowship in Welsh.
 During World War II he supervised technical research in German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese.
 Later, at NYU he taught Yiddish, Gothic, Old Saxon, Frisian, Old Norse, Scandinavian, Sanskrit as well as German.
 He was visiting professor of Celtic languages at Columbia University in 1947.

Question: Was Paul Boghossian Chair of the Department in the NYU Department of Philosophy during the same year when System of a Down was formed?
Answer: yes