New & noteworthy

Zakaria Al Balushi, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, has been selected to receive the Micron Corporation Early Career Award.

Sofia Arevalo (B.S.’16, M.S.’18, Ph.D.’22 ME), Kristina Monakhova (Ph.D.’22 EECS) and George Moore (M.S.’19, Ph.D.’22 ME) were selected for MIT’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program for Engineering Excellence.

Hari Balakrishnan (M.S.’95, Ph.D.’98 CS) has been awarded the 2023 Marconi Prize in recognition of the “broad impact to society of his fundamental discoveries in wired and wireless networking, mobile sensing and distributed systems.” He is a professor at MIT and the founder, chief technology officer and chairman of Cambridge Mobile Telematics.

Professors Alexandre Bayen and Ali Javey of electrical engineering and computer sciences have been named 2023 IEEE Fellows.

Alison Burklund (MEng ’16 BioE), Courtney Chow (B.S.’16 IEOR), Joey Kabel (M.S.’17, Ph.D.’20 NE) and Jiachen Li (Ph.D.’22 AS&T) were named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list. Burklund is the co-founder and CTO of Nanopath, which creates diagnostics that quickly test for pelvic and gynecologic infections; Chow is the vice president of Battery Ventures, a technology and software-focused investment firm; Kabel’s startup, Electrified Thermal, is building a thermal battery that converts and stores cheap, renewable electricity as high-temperature heat; and Li is working on an all-season, smart roof coating in collaboration with materials science professor Junqiao Wu.

Norman Chang (B.S.’85, M.S.’87, Ph.D.’90 EECS) has been selected as an IEEE Fellow “for leadership in the physical-level sign-off of electronic design automation for SoC/3DIC.”

Electrical engineering and computer sciences professor emerita Constance Chang-Hasnain (Ph.D.’87 EECS) won the 2022 Welker Award at Compound Semiconductor Week for “pioneering contributions to VCSEL photonics, nanophotonics and high contrast metastructures for optical communications and optical sensing.”

Tina Chen (Ph.D.’22 MSE) and materials science and engineering Ph.D. students KyuJung Jun and Ji Min Kim have been selected to receive the Materials Research Society Silver Award.

Jason Cheng-Hsiang Hsu, Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering and computer sciences, won the best student presentation award at the 2022 Magnetism and Magnetic Materials Conference.

Electrical engineering and computer sciences associate professor Prabal Dutta (Ph.D.’09 CS) has won the 2022 ACM SenSys Test of Time Award. The paper — co-authored by Stephen Dawson-Haggerty (M.S.’10, Ph.D.’14 CS), among others — was recognized “for pioneering the use of synchronous transmissions in low-power protocols by exploiting their benefits at the MAC layer and pushing the limits of radio operation.”

Orla Feely (M.S.’90, Ph.D.’92 EECS) has been appointed president of University College Dublin, becoming the university’s first woman president. Previously, she served as the vice president for research, innovation and impact.

Philip Fine (B.S.’93 MSE/ME) is the new executive officer of the Bay Area Quality Management District.

Civil and environmental engineering professor Ashok Gadgil co-edited an open access graduate-level textbook, “An Introduction to Development Engineering,” which includes contributions from more than 40 practicing experts as co-authors. Springer published the book, which is available as a free PDF.

Rakesh Goel (M.S.’85, Ph.D.’90 CE) is the new dean at UC Merced’s School of Engineering. He most recently served as executive associate dean of engineering at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

Venkatesan Guruswami, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, has won a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship. He plans to use the fellowship to continue his research into understanding and devising the most resource-efficient approaches to solving computational problems, and mapping the boundary between their tractable and intractable variants.

Electrical engineering and computer sciences assistant professor Nika Haghtalab, professor Michael Jordan and Ph.D. student Eric Zhao have won a NeurIPS 2022 Outstanding Paper Award for “On-Demand Sampling: Learning Optimally From Multiple Distributions.”

Computer science professor Joseph Hellerstein (M.S.’92 CS) has won the IEEE VIS Test of Time Award for a 2012 paper he co-wrote with Jeffrey Heer (B.S.’01, M.S.’04, Ph.D.’08 EECS), Sean Kandel and Andreas Paepcke: “Enterprise Data Analysis and Visualization: An Interview Study.”

Alishba Imran, an undergraduate student studying computer science and materials science, was named to Teen Vogue’s “21 under 21” list. Her work focuses on using machine learning to solve real-world problems.

Cesunica Ivey, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, has been awarded
a Women in Science Incentive Prize by the Story Exchange in recognition for her work using supercomputers and wearables to monitor air pollution.

Assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences Angjoo Kanazawa has been named a 2023 Sloan Research Fellow.

William Kastenberg (Ph.D.’66 NE), professor emeritus of nuclear engineering, has published a memoir, “As a Matter of Heart: A Nuclear Engineering Professor’s Life-changing Journey From Safety to Self,” which tells the story of his quest to discover his authentic self, which was hidden behind the role of professor.

Yasser Khan (Ph.D.’18 EECS) has joined the faculty at the University of Southern California’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as an assistant professor.

Jikun Kim (B.S.’86 EECS) is the new senior vice president and chief financial officer of CalAmp Corp., a connected intelligence company.

Civil and environmental engineering associate professor Dimitrios Konstantinidis (B.S.’99, M.S.’01, Ph.D.’08 CEE) has received the 2021 Best Paper in Analysis and
Computation Award from the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering.

Andrea Kritcher (M.S.’07, Ph.D.’09 NE) was named one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People” of 2023. She works at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and was the lead designer on the National Ignition Facility’s effort to achieve fusion ignition for the first time
in history.

Industrial engineering and operations research professor Javad Lavaei was named a Fellow of IEEE as well as a Fellow of the Asia Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association. He has also been awarded the IEEE CSS Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize for “outstanding and highly interdisciplinary contributions to distributed control, nonlinear optimization and innovative applications to energy systems.”

Edward Lee (Ph.D.’86 EECS), professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer sciences, has won the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Embedded Systems Technical Achievement Award.

Electrical engineering and computer sciences professor emeritus Michael Lieberman has won the AVS Plasma Prize from the Plasma Science and Technology Division of AVS for “his foundational contributions to the field of low temperature plasmas and plasma processing.”

Dean Tsu-Jae King Liu has been named to the new Industrial Advisory Committee for the U.S. Department of Commerce. The advisory body, led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, will provide guidance to the secretary of commerce on a range of issues related to domestic semiconductor research and development in support of CHIPS for America.

Arun Majumdar (Ph.D.’89 ME) has been named the first dean of Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability.

Sifat Muin (M.S.’13, Ph.D.’18 CEE) has joined the faculty at the University of Southern California as a research assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Associate professor Rikky Muller (Ph.D.’13 EECS) and professor Jaijeet Roychowdhury (M.S.’89, Ph.D.’93 EECS), both from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, have been named 2023 Bakar Prize winners.

Civil and environmental engineering Ph.D. student Aqshems Nichols has been named the Collaborative Sciences Center for Road Safety’s Student of the Year.

Melinda Ng (B.S.’96 CE) has released “Mattie and the Machine,” a young adult historical novel based on 19th century inventor Margaret Knight. The book was published under the pen name Lynn Ng Quezon.

Daniel Ogg (M.S.’91 NE) has been selected as the executive director of the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. Earlier in his career, he worked at the U.S. Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board and served in the U.S. Navy aboard a nuclear-powered submarine.

Mechanical engineering professor Oliver O’Reilly has been selected for the University of Galway’s Alumni Award for Engineering, Science and Technology.

Electrical engineering and computer sciences researcher Girish Pahwa has won the 2022 IEEE Electron Device Society Early Career Award. He is currently the executive director of the Berkeley Device Modeling Center.

Colin Parris (M.S.’87, Ph.D.’94 EECS), senior vice president and digital chief technology officer at General Electric, was named 2023 Black Engineer of the Year by US Black Engineer and Information Technology magazine for his significant contributions to the fields of science and engineering and his work in digital transformation.

Materials science and engineering professor Kristin Persson was elected a lifetime Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for her work on the Materials Project. She was also selected as the recipient of the Cyril Stanley Smith Award by the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society.

Lisa Pruitt, professor of mechanical engineering, has published “Soul of a Professor: Memoir of an Un-Engineered Life.” In the book, she shares how she battled alcohol abuse and an eating disorder behind a “protective armor” of academic and professional achievements, ultimately finding healing through work with her horse.

Arvind Raman (Ph.D.’99 ME) is the new dean of Purdue University’s College of Engineering. He has  served as the university’s executive associate dean of engineering since 2019.

Materials science and engineering professor Ramamoorthy Ramesh (Ph.D.’87 MSE) has been elected as a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

David Rogers (M.S.’79, Ph.D.’82 CE), professor of geological engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, has received the Schuster Medal from the Canadian Geotechnical Society and the Association of Environmental and Engineering Geologists.

Electrical engineering and computer sciences professor Alberto Sangiovanni-Vicentelli has received the BBVA Foundation’s Frontiers of Knowledge Award for transforming chip design from a handcrafted process to the automated industry that powers today’s electronic devices. He was also awarded the Honoris Causa Doctorate in Electronic Engineering by the Tor Vergata University of Rome.

Mark Schanfein (M.S.’74 MSE) has been elected president of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management.

Susan Shaheen, professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Bill Quirk, ITS senior fellow, have been appointed to the California Air Resources Board.

Scott Shenker, professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer sciences, has won the 2023 IEEE Computer Society Women of ENIAC Computer Pioneer Award for  “pioneering contributions to scheduling and management of packet-switched networks, impacting the theory and practice of communication networks.”

Somayeh Sojoudi, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and of mechanical engineering, and mechanical engineering Ph.D. student Elizabeth Glista have won a Best of the Best Conference Paper Award at the 2022 IEEE Power and Energy Society general meeting.

Electrical engineering and computer sciences professors Dawn Song (Ph.D.’02 CS) and David Wagner (M.S.’99, Ph.D.’00 CS) have won the Test-of-Time Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control for their 2011 paper, “Android Permissions Demystified.”

Brian Spears (Ph.D.’04 ME) was part of the efforts at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility to achieve fusion ignition for the first time in history. He led the modeling half of the inertial confinement fusion program’s science and physics team.

Nuclear engineering Ph.D. student Sarah Stevenson has been selected for the 2023 ANS Glenn T. Seaborg Congressional Science and Engineering Fellowship.

Bioengineering professor Aaron Streets was named to Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10,” a list honoring trailblazing early-career scientists and engineers who are tackling pressing challenges with innovative solutions. Additionally, he has won the 2023 Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence and Equity, and he was also named to the inaugural class of Science Diversity Leadership Award winners, a new partnership between the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

Emma Vargo, a materials science Ph.D. student, was named the winner of the 2022 Gareth Thomas Materials Excellence Award.

Junqiao Wu (Ph.D.’02 AS&T), professor of materials science and engineering, has received the 2023 FMD John Bardeen Award from the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society in recognition of his outstanding contributions in the field of electronic materials. In addition, he was elected vice chair of the Division of Materials Physics of the American Physical Society.

Industrial engineering and operations research professor Candace Yano has received the INFORMS President’s Award in recognition of her many research contributions and impact on educating future operations research professionals, as well as for her extensive INFORMS service.

Associate professor of bioengineering Michael Yartsev has been awarded the Cajal Club Krieg Cortical Kudos for his “superb contributions to our understanding of the neuroscience of behavior, social learning and anatomical pathways involved in group sociality and communication” through his research on bats. He was also named the winner of the 2022 Peter Gruss Young Investigator Award by the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience, as well as the 2022 Young Investigator Award from the Society for Neuroscience.