New & noteworthy
Rebecca Abergel, professor of nuclear engineering and of chemistry, was installed as president of the Radiation Research Society, where she will lead efforts to strengthen mentorship, collaboration and innovation across the radiation sciences community.
Eva Agus (B.S.’01 EngSci; M.S.’07, Ph.D.’11 CEE) has been selected as a Redwood National and State Parks artist-in-residence. After two decades in water and energy infrastructure, she now creates batik-inspired wood panel paintings of urban greenscapes and wildlife encounters.
Ana Claudia Arias and Tahir Ghani, faculty members in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, have been elected to the National Academy of Inventors 2025 Class of Fellows. Professor Arias centers her research on printed and flexible electronics, using these materials to fabricate bendable devices and sensors for health applications. Visiting professor Ghani, director of semiconductor research at Intel Corp., has played a central role in the transformation of transistor technology.
Mechanical engineering professor Francesco Borrelli has won the Italian Scientists and Scholars in North America Foundation’s 2025 Innovator Award.
Frederik Breuer (B.S.’25 Energy Eng) helped power the University of Cambridge men’s rowing team to victory against their Oxford rivals in the 2026 Boat Race. Breuer, who was in the stroke position, is studying energy technologies as a master’s student at Cambridge.
Three early-career faculty in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences — Yuan Cao, Sarah Chasins (Ph.D.’19 CS) and John Wright — have been awarded prestigious 2026 Sloan Research Fellowships.
Maya Carrasquillo, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Steve Conolly, professor of bioengineering and of electrical engineering and computer sciences, have received UC Berkeley’s 2026 Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Awards, as the early-career and late-career faculty awardees, respectively. In addition, Ph.D. students Leen Arnaout, Zhe Fu and Carlos Ng Pitti were named recipients of the 2026 Outstanding Graduate Peer Mentor Award.
The 2026 UC Berkeley Achievement Awards have honored computer science professor John DeNero (Ph.D.’10 CS) with the Fiat Lux Faculty Award. Additionally, Gary May (M.S.’88, Ph.D.’91 EECS) was selected for the Campanile Excellence in Achievement Award, and Paige Balcom (M.S.’18, Ph.D.’22 ME) and Arjun Singh (B.S.’10, Ph.D.’16 EECS) for the Mark Bingham Award for Excellence in Achievement by Young Alumni.
Tejal Desai (Ph.D.’98 BioE) was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is currently dean and professor of engineering at Brown University.
Bioengineering professor Dan Fletcher has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine for his contributions to the mechanistic understanding of biological self-assembly and mechanotransduction, and for his work developing mobile phone-based microscopy for remote diagnosis of infectious diseases.
Shafi Goldwasser (M.S.’81, Ph.D.’84 CS), professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, and Karl van Bibber, professor of nuclear engineering, have been inducted into the American Academy of Sciences and Letters.
A research paper by Xin Guo, department chair and professor of industrial engineering and operations research, has been selected as one of 50 landmark papers published in Mathematics of Operations Research.
Venkatesan Guruswami, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and of mathematics, has been selected as the new director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley.
A research project on brain aging by bioengineering professor Amy Herr has been selected for a Weill Neurohub Investigator Award, which funds top faculty to form interdisciplinary teams to create bold new concepts and technologies.
Nuclear engineering professor Peter Hosemann has been awarded the distinguished title of adjunct professor by his alma mater, Montanuniversität Leoben.
Postdoctoral researcher Sathvik Iyengar has been named a 2026 Schmidt Science Fellow. His research focuses on devices for energy-efficient computing and extending these solid-state platforms into flexible, stretchable and wearable electronic systems.
Michael I. Jordan, professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer sciences and of statistics, has been elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences as a foreign member, as well as to the Italian Academy of Engineering.
Randy Katz (M.S.’78, Ph.D.’80 CS), professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer sciences, was awarded the Berkeley Citation, the university’s highest honor. The citation is awarded to individuals whose contributions to UC Berkeley go beyond the call of duty and whose achievements exceed the standards of excellence in their fields.
Aditi Krishnapriyan, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and of chemical and biomolecular engineering, has been awarded a 2025 U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Research Program Award.
Civil and environmental engineering professor Shaofan Li has been appointed to the National Academy of Artificial Intelligence in recognition of his contributions to advancing the frontiers of AI-driven scientific innovation.
Tsu-Jae King Liu — president of the National Academy of Engineering and electrical engineering and computer sciences professor emerita — received the 2025 Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award, the highest distinction granted by the Global Semiconductor Alliance. In 2025, she was also awarded the Berkeley Citation.
Assistant professor of mechanical engineering Negar Mehr (Ph.D.’19 ME) has received the Office of Naval Research’s 2026 Young Investigator Program Award.
Bioengineering Ph.D. student James Pai has been named a recipient of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, which provides merit-based funding for immigrants and children of immigrants to pursue graduate education in the United States.
Eric Paulos (B.A.’91, M.S.’99, Ph.D.’01 CS), professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, has been elected to the Association for Computing Machinery’s Computer-Human Interaction Academy in recognition of his significant contributions to the field.
Professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences Robert Pilawa-Podgurski has received the IEEE Power Electronics Society Technical Achievement Award for Integration and Miniaturization of Switching Power Converters.
The Association for Computing Machinery has named Sylvia Ratnasamy (M.S.’99, Ph.D.’02 CS), professor of computer science, to its 2025 class of fellows in recognition of her “contributions to networks and networked systems.”
Sayeef Salahuddin, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, was awarded the 2026 James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials by the American Physical Society.
Eunice Santos (M.S.’93, Ph.D.’95 CS) has been appointed the inaugural dean of the newly merged College of Engineering and Computing at Drexel University. She is formerly the dean of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Somayeh Sojoudi, associate professor-in-residence of electrical engineering and computer sciences and of mechanical engineering, has been named a 2026 IEEE Fellow “for contributions to optimization and learning techniques for complex systems.”
Electrical engineering and computer sciences professor Dawn Song (Ph.D.’02 CS) was selected as a 2025 AI2050 Senior Fellow by Schmidt Sciences. The fellowship honors researchers advancing responsible innovation and the development of AI that benefits humanity.
Connor Tou (B.S.’20 BioE) has been named a 2025 STAT Wunderkind by STAT News, an award that honors early-career scientists who are helping to reshape biomedical research and healthcare.
Electrical engineering and computer sciences professor Umesh Vazirani (Ph.D.’86 CS) and co-authors Aranyak Mehta, Amin Saberi and Vijay Vazirani (Ph.D.’84 CS) are recipients of the FOCS Test of Time Award for their 2005 paper, “AdWords and Generalized On-line Matching.”
Bioengineering professor Michael Yartsev has been named to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s 101st Class of Fellows for his trailblazing work in neuroscience and neuroengineering. One of the country’s most prestigious awards, Guggenheim Fellowships give innovators a monetary stipend allowing them to freely pursue independent work at the highest level.
Matei Zaharia (M.S.’09, Ph.D.’13 CS) — associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, as well as the co-founder and chief technology officer of Databricks, Inc. — has been awarded the ACM Prize in Computing for his visionary development of distributed data systems and computing infrastructure, which has helped enable large-scale machine learning, analytics and AI at a global scale.
Alex Zhao (B.S.’21 EECS/Bus. Admin.) has been elected the 140th president of Harvard Law Review. Before starting at law school, he was a Schwarzman Scholar and worked as a software engineer at a startup.
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