Educating leaders. Creating knowledge. Serving society.

Home > Research & faculty > Faculty > Faculty honors and awards

Faculty honors and awards

Berkeley Engineering faculty receive the most prestigious awards and honors bestowed by academic and professional societies, foundations and other civic organizations. Among these are nearly six dozen active and emeriti faculty who hold membership in the National Academy of Engineering.

Ashok Gadgil wins Zayed Future Energy Prize’s Lifetime Achievement Award

UC Berkeley civil and environmental engineering professor Ashok Gadgil has won the Lifetime Achievement award of the 2012 Zayed Future Energy Prize. The $3.5 million prize recognizes and rewards innovation, leadership and longterm vision in renewable energy and sustainability. Gadgil was recognized for “his sustainable humanitarian work in Darfur — providing energy efficient cooking stoves known as Berkeley-Darfur stoves, cutting the need for firewood by 55 percent.”

Berkeley Engineering nanotechnology expert Paul Alivisatos wins Wolf Prize in Chemistry

Paul Alivisatos, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC Berkeley professor of materials science and engineering, and the Larry and Diane Bock Professor of Nanotechnology, has won the prestigious Wolf Foundation Prize in Chemistry for 2012. Alivisatos is an internationally recognized authority on nanochemistry and a pioneer in the synthesis of semiconductor quantum dots and multi-shaped artificial nanostructures.

Berkeley Engineering professor Carlo H. Séquin wins 2012 Mathematical Art Exhibition Award

Carlo H. Séquin, professor of electrical engineering at computer sciences at UC Berkeley, has received an award for his mathematical sculpture, “Lawson’s Minimum-Energy Klein Bottle,” in the Mathematical Art competition hosted by the American Mathematical Society. Séquin has been creating abstract geometrical art since the early 1980s, and created the winning artwork using a program called Sculpture Generator 1, “which allows me to explore many more complex ideas…and to design and execute…geometries with higher precision.”

Luke Lee awarded Gates Foundation grant

Berkeley Bioengineering Professor Luke Lee has been selected to receive a Point-of-Care Diagnostics grant through Grand Challenges in Global Health, an initiative created by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The project goal is to develop a microfluidic Universal Sample Preparation (USP) module that is relevant for parallel diagnostics of infectious diseases. The grant will provide $1.47 million in research funding over three years.

Berkeley Engineering professor Lisa Pruitt wins A. Richard Newton Educator Award

The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology announced today the 2011 A. Richard Newton Educator Award, which recognizes teaching practices, techniques or innovative and new education approaches that attract girls and women to math, computing, and engineering. The first winner of the new award is Lisa Pruitt, professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley. Lisa Pruitt is deeply committed to ensuring the technological prowess of our society and economy, and works tirelessly and enthusiastically to invite and inspire a full spectrum of participants to pursue engineering endeavors.

ACM, IEEE Computer Society honor UC Berkeley professor Susan L. Graham for software development tools

Susan L. Graham of the University of California Berkeley will receive the ACM-IEEE Computer Society Ken Kennedy Award for contributions to computer programming tools that have significantly advanced software development. Graham’s research covers many areas of software, including human-computer interaction, programming systems, and high-performance computing. Her research collaborations have led to the construction of several interactive tools to enhance programmer productivity as well as programming language implementation methods that foster performance and software quality.