New & noteworthy
The Seismological Society of America presented its highest honor, the 2024 Harry Fielding Reid Medal, to Norman Abrahamson, adjunct professor of civil and environmental engineering, for his global leadership in the field of probabilistic seismic hazard assessment.
Alexis Abramson (Ph.D.’02 ME) was appointed as the next dean of the Columbia Climate School. An expert in sustainable energy technology and advanced energy research, she is currently dean of the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth.
Five Berkeley Engineering professors are among the 2024 Spark Award winners from the Bakar Fellows program: Zakaria Al Balushi, assistant professor of materials science and engineering; Liana Lareau, assistant professor of bioengineering; Jennifer Listgarten, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences; Robert Pilawa-Podgurski, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences; and Adam Yala, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences.
Researchers from three multi-institutional teams have won major awards from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health to fund pioneering biomedical research. A research team led by Mekhail Anwar (M.S.’01 EECS), professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences as well as of radiation oncology at UCSF, was awarded up to $15 million to develop a next-gen miniature scanner to detect individual cancer cells during surgery. Projects in microbiome engineering, led by bioengineering professor Adam Arkin, and in implantable biologic drug delivery, including work by associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences Rikky Muller (Ph.D.’13 EECS), will receive up to $22.7 million and $34.9 million, respectively.
Alexandre Bayen, CITRIS director and professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and of civil and environmental engineering, has been honored with the following 2024 IEEE awards: ITS Institutional Lead Award, ITS Outstanding Research Award and CSS Transition to Practice Award.
Electrical engineering and computer sciences assistant professor Jessica Boles has won an ARPA-E Inspiring Generations of New Innovators to Impact Technologies in Energy 2024 (IGNITE) Early Career Award, as well as the 2023 Power Electronics Prize Letter Award.
This fall, Berkeley Engineering welcomed six new tenure-track and teaching professors: Yuan Cao, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences; Huiwen Jia, assistant professor of industrial engineering and operations research; Ken Kamrin (B.S.’03 Eng. Physics), associate professor of mechanical engineering; Phillip Kerger, assistant teaching professor of industrial engineering and operations research; Pierluigi Nuzzo, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences; and Eleanor Tubman, assistant professor of nuclear engineering.
Suraj Cheema (Ph.D.’21 MSE) joined MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering as an assistant professor, with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Electrical engineering and computer sciences assistant professor Irene Chen is the recipient of a Google Research Scholar Award.
Electrical engineering and computer sciences associate professor Alvin Cheung has been awarded the Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize for his groundbreaking work on “verified lifting,” applying ideas from program synthesis to dramatically improve the end-to-end performance of database-backed applications.
Jack Dennerlein (Ph.D.’96 ME) was named the dean of the College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College at Boston University.
Electrical engineering and computer sciences associate professor Anca Dragan was named the head of AI safety and alignment at Google DeepMind.
Massimiliano Fratoni, associate professor of nuclear engineering, has been awarded the 2024 ANS Untermyer and Cisler Reactor Technology Medal for his outstanding contributions to the advancement of nuclear technology.
Fast Company highlighted Tomas Garcia (MDes ’23) for his “[tech]tonic toolkit,” a device developed for his 2023 master’s thesis that makes emergency preparedness more accessible by relying on long-range, low-power mesh networks for post-disaster communication rather than on cell towers or satellites. The innovation is a winner of the magazine’s 2024 Innovation by Design Awards.
The Arizona Board of Regents has appointed Suresh Garimella (Ph.D.’89 ME) as the next president of the University of Arizona. He is currently the president of the University of Vermont. Previously, he served as executive vice president for research and partnerships at Purdue University.
Civil and environmental engineering professor Allen Goldstein received the Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award for Late Career Faculty, which recognizes faculty for outstanding mentorship of graduate students at UC Berkeley.
Andrés Gómez (M.S.’14, Ph.D.’17 IEOR), assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering at USC, received a Young Investigator Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
Six graduate students were honored as Siebel Scholars Foundation’s class of 2025 and will be awarded $35,000 grants to advance their research: Cade Gordon, Claire Hilburger and Sakshi Shah of bioengineering, and Jessica Lin, Eric Markley and Oliver Yu of electrical engineering and computer sciences.
Vivek K. Goyal (M.S.’95, Ph.D.’98 EECS), professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University, has been named a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow. The award recognizes his groundbreaking work in computational imaging, including research to photograph objects hidden by walls and around corners.
Electrical engineering and computer sciences professor emeritus Paul Gray has won the National Academy of Engineering’s Simon Ramo Founders Award, one of the academy’s highest honors. He was cited “for contributions to modern analog integrated circuit design through research and education, and for leadership of academic, philanthropic and corporate enterprises.”
D. Vaughan Griffiths (M.S.’75 CE) was named head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Colorado School of Mines.
Ashraf Habibullah (M.S.’70 CE), CEO of Computer and Structures Inc., returned to campus in September to deliver a talk on the importance of “human engineering” in education, drawing a crowd of civil and environmental engineering students.
Nuclear engineering undergraduate student Eric He was awarded a 2024 fellowship by Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society.
Teresa Head-Gordon — professor of bioengineering, of chemistry and of chemical and biomolecular engineering — has been honored with a research award from the Humboldt Foundation, which fosters collaboration with German scientists.
Dorit Hochbaum, professor of industrial engineering and operations research, has been awarded the 2024 Khachiyan Prize by the INFORMS Optimization Society.
Electrical engineering and computer sciences graduate students Logan Horowitz, Syed Tahmid Mahbub, Jiarui Zou and professor Robert Pilawa-Podgurski have received a Best Showcase Award at the 2024 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit. In collaboration with researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and other academic and industry partners, the Berkeley team developed technology that aims to drastically improve the efficiency of future data centers.
Cesunica Ivey, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, has won the Sloan Scholars Mentoring Network’s Early Career Alumnus Award in recognition of her past and future contributions to research, teaching, professional service and community service.
Maryam Kamgarpour (M.S.’07, Ph.D.’11 ME) won the European Control Award for her research in the SYCAMORE lab.
Electrical engineering and computer sciences assistant professor Angjoo Kanazawa has won the IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference Young Researcher Award, which recognizes researchers who have made distinguished contributions to computer vision within seven years of receiving their Ph.D.
Yasser Khan (Ph.D.’18 EECS) has been honored by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation as one of the 2024 Packard Fellows for Science and Engineering. An assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at USC, he was recognized for his groundbreaking research on neurochemical dynamics in the brain and gut, exploring their connections to physiological processes and disease mechanisms.
Electrical engineering and computer sciences assistant professor Preeya Khanna (Ph.D.’17 BioE) has received the New Innovator Award from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. She will study how different parts of the brain collaborate to “control precise movements, like handling objects” and will develop stimulation techniques that aim to boost neural communication across these areas. Khanna is also the recipient of a Google Research Scholar Award.
Materials science and engineering Ph.D. student Calton Kong has been named a winner of a prestigious Hertz Foundation Fellowship. His research focuses on sustainable energy conversion.
Kevin Kornegay (M.S.’90, Ph.D.’92 EECS) was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is currently a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Morgan State University.
Jason Lee (B.S.’05 ME) joined a team of four volunteers who entered the Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) to embark on a simulated mission to Mars. Their 45-day stay involved conducting scientific research and operational tasks, including simulated walks on Mars’ surface.
Johanna Mathieu (M.S.’08, Ph.D.’12 ME), associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Michigan, is a 2024 C3E Fundamental and Applied Research Award winner. Her research focuses on using new operational and control strategies to reduce the environmental impact, cost and inefficiency of electric power systems.
Scott McCarey (M.S.’01 CEE) was named the new director of transportation services at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Donald Mendoza (M.S.’95, Ph.D.’96 ME) has been named the chief engineer for the NASA Engineering and Safety Center at Moffett Field. In addition, he serves on the mathematics and statistics faculty at Menlo College.
Maj Mirmirani (M.S.’71, Ph.D.’77 ME) was named interim dean of the College of Engineering at Lawrence Technological University.
Civil and environmental engineering professor Kara Nelson received the 2024 Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of GSIs, which is presented to a UC Berkeley faculty member who has provided outstanding pedagogical mentorship to GSIs in preparation for teaching in future careers.
Civil and environmental engineering assistant professor Eyitayo Opabola has been named the 2023 Shah Family Innovation Prize recipient by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute.
Kristin Persson, professor of materials science and engineering, has been named a 2024 Distinguished Scientist Fellow by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science for “pioneering data-driven approach to accelerate clean energy innovations.”
Civil and environmental engineering assistant professor Amy Pickering (M.S.’04 CEE) was named a 2023 Rising Star in Environmental Research by ACS Environmental AU. Her research focuses on environmental transmission pathways of enteric pathogens and drug-resistant bacteria in high-disease burden settings.
Rebecca Portnoff (Ph.D.’18 EECS) was selected for MIT Technology Review’s “35 under 35 innovators” list for 2024 for her efforts in using AI to fight the sexual abuse of children.
Ravi Prasher, adjunct professor of mechanical engineering, and Sayeef Salahuddin, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, have been elected as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Salahuddin also won the IEEE Andrew S. Grove Award “for pioneering contributions to physics of ferroelectrics and integrated ferroelectric devices.”
Ramamoorthy Ramesh (Ph.D.’87 MSE), professor of materials science and engineering, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). He is one of the few scholars who has earned membership in both the NAS and the National Academy of Engineering.
Electrical engineering and computer sciences professor Alberto L. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in recognition for his excellence in developing and improving a variety of modern electronics systems.
Electrical engineering and computer sciences assistant professor Sophia Shao has won the Anita Borg Early Career Award from the Computing Research Association’s Committee on Widening Participation in Computing Research.
Kendra V. Sharp (MEng ’96 ME) has been appointed the next dean of the School of Engineering at Santa Clara University, beginning her term in March 2025. Since 2021, she has headed the National Science Foundation’s Office of International Science and Engineering.
Barbara Simons (M.S.’81, Ph.D.’81 EECS) was honored this fall for her years of work on voting integrity and her leadership as board chair of Verified Voting. Nancy Pelosi presented Simons with an award for her unwavering commitment to securing our elections.
Nuclear engineering professor Kai Vetter has been named a recipient of the Berkeley Lab’s Director’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in recognition of his “career-spanning achievements in radiation detection and imaging, his impact on science and society, and his commitment to developing the next generation of scientific leaders.”
Electrical engineering and computer sciences professor Laura Waller has been awarded a Max Planck-Humboldt Medal, awarded jointly by the Max Planck Society and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, for “combining computer science and simple instruments to achieve such things as making more details visible and creating three-dimensional images or videos.”
Linnea Warburton (M.S.’22, Ph.D.’24 ME), a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Boris Rubinsky, Professor of the Graduate School at the Department of Mechanical Engineering and professor emeritus of bioengineering, was recognized by the Society of Cryobiology with the Crystal Award for best oral presentation and the Critser Award for highest ranked student abstract.
Hakim Weatherspoon (Ph.D.’06 CS) is a 2024 Diamond Award honoree from the University of Washington’s College of Engineering.
Bioengineering professor Michael Yartsev was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. In addition, he was given the 2024 Boehringer Ingelheim FENS Research Award by the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies, in recognition of his outstanding and innovative work.
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