2023 EECS Awards

It’s the summer of 2023, and we want to celebrate the accomplishments and contributions of our incredible EECS community by sharing some of the awards given by the department this year. Congratulations to all the winners!

The following is a list of all 2023 award winners.

Seth J. Teller Award for Excellence, Diversity and Inclusion

• Taylor Baum
• Marija Ilic
• Martin Nisser

Frederick C. Hennie III Award for Teaching Excellence

• Ajay R. Brahmakshatriva
• Benjamin B. Kettle
• Joseph Ravichandran

Burgess (1952) & Elizabeth Jamieson Award for Excellence in Teaching

• Adam Chlipala
• Fredo Durand

Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching

• YuFeng Kevin Chen
• Daniel Sanchez

Jerome Salzer Award for Excellence in Teaching Recitation Sections

• Henry Corrigan-Gibbs

Louis D. Smullin (‘39) Award for Teaching Excellence

• Jelena Notaros

EECS Outstanding Educator Award

• Jonathan Ragan-Kelley
• Tess Smidt

Kolokotrones Education Award

• Joseph D. Steinmeyer

Carlton E. Tucker Award for teaching excellence

• Hope K. Dargan
• Amir H. Karamlou

Harold L. Hazen Award for teaching excellence

• Gabrielle E. Ecanow
• Miloslawa Piszczek
• Peggy Yang

EECS Digital Innovation Award

• Shen Shen

Department Head Special Recognition Award

• Peter Franklin Satterthwaite

Richard J Caloggero Award

• Dennis M. Freeman

Behring Undergraduate Prize

• Thomas Bergamaschi

Ernst A. Guillemin SM Thesis Award in EECS

• Sayed S. Afzal for “Battery-Free Subsea Internet-of-Things”. Thesis supervised by Fadel Adib.
• Nikola Samardzic for “Making Computation on Encrypted Data Practical through Hardware Acceleration of Fully Homomorphic Encryption”. Supervised by Daniel Sanchez.

Ernst A. Guillemin SM Thesis Award in Artificial Intelligence and Decision-Making

• Brice Huang for “Computational Hardness in Random Optimization Problems from the Overlap Gap Property”. Supervised by Guy Bresler.
• Olivia Seow for “An Intuitive Tool For 3D Design Creation”. Supervised by Stefanie Mueller.

William A. Martin SM Thesis Award in Computer Science

• Simon H. Langowski for “Fast, Metadata-private Anonymous Broadcast”. Supervised by Srini Devadas.
• Rachel Zhang for “The Optimal Error Resilience of Interactive Communication Over Binary Channels”. Supervised by Vinod Vaikuntanathan and Yael Kalai.

Jin Au Kong PhD Thesis in EE

• Murat Onen for “Devices and Algorithms for Analog Deep Learning”. Supervised by Jesus Del Alamo.
• Christopher L. Panuski for “Resonant Spatial Light Modulation: Optical Programming and Sensing at the Fundamental Limit”. Supervised by Dirk Englund.
• Youngkyu Sung for “High-fidelity Two-qubit Gates and Noise Spectroscopy with Superconducting Qubits”. Supervised by Will Oliver.

George M. Sprowls PhD Thesis Award in AI+D

• Jason M. Altschuler for “Transport and Beyond: Efficient Optimization over Probability Distributions”. Thesis supervised by Pablo Parrilo.
• Feras A. Saad for “Scalable Structure Learning, Inference, and Analysis with Probabilistic Programs”. Thesis supervised by Vikash Mansinghka.
• Jingzhao Zhang for “Optimization Theory and Machine Learning Practice: Mind the Gap”. Thesis supervised by Suvrit Sra.

George M. Sprowls PhD Thesis Award in Computer Science

• Tej Chajed for “Verifying a concurrent, crash-safe file system with sequential reasoning”. Thesis supervised by Nickolai Zeldovich and Frans Kaashoek.
• Lijie Chen for “Better Hardness via Algorithms, and New Forms of Hardness versus Randomness”. Thesis supervised by Ryan Williams.
• Alex Lombardi for “Provable Instantiations of Correlation Intractability and the Fiat-Shamir Heuristic”. Thesis supervised by Vinod Vaikuntanathan.

Robert M. Fano UROP Award

• Purvaja Balaji for “EntailClass: A Classification Approach to EntailSum and Evaluation”. Supervised by Amar Gupta.
• Helena A. Merker for “End-to-End Document Extraction, Identification, and Evaluation”.

Jeremy Gerstle UROP

• Aparna Ajit Gupte for “Cryptographic Hardness of Sparse Linear Regression and Gaussian Mixture Learning”. Supervised by Vinod Vaikuntanathan.
• Raiphy Jerez for “Electronic and mechanical design for mass manufacturing of modular robots”. Supervised by Stefanie Mueller.

Morais (1986) and Rosenblum (1986) Fund UROP Award

• Rui Yao for “Efficient Truncated Linear Regression with Unknown Noise Variance”. Supervised by Costis Daskalakis.

Anna Pogosyants UROP Prize

• Ahmed Katary, for “Functionality-Aware Styling: Fabricating Functional Objects with Selective”. Supervised by Stefanie Mueller.

Licklider UROP Award

• Divya V. Nori for “De novo PROTAC Design Using Graph-based Deep Generative Models”. Supervised by Connor W. Coley.

2023 SuperUROP Outstanding Research Award

• William Li for “Polygenic Dissection of Phenotypic Heterogeneity in Alzheimer’s Disease”. Supervised by Manolis Kellis and Yosuke Tanigawa.
• Katherine Mohr for “Transforming Datacenter Applications to Microsecond Latency with Continuous Profile-Guided Optimization”. Supervised by Saman Amarasinghe.

George C. Newton Undergraduate Lab Prize

• Stephen S. Kandeh
• Julio A. Rodriguez

Northern Telecom/BNR Project Award

• Thanadol (Pleng) Chomphoochan
• Dillon M. DuPont

David Adler Memorial EE MEng Thesis Award

• William Wu for “Neural Data Shaping and Evaluation via Mutual Information Estimation”. Supervised by Muriel Médard.
• Jeanne L. Harabedian for “Modeling the Arterial System to Improve Ultrasound Measurements of Hemodynamic Parameters”. Supervised by Charles Sodini.

Charles & Jennifer Johnson Computer Science MEng thesis award

• Alexandra Dima for “GSTACO: A Generalized Sparse Tensor Algebra Compiler”. Supervised by Saman Amarasinghe.
• Amir Farhat for “Increasing DoS-Resilience for Cross-Protocol Proxies”. Supervised by Karen Sollins.

Charles & Jennifer Johnson Artificial Intelligence and Decision-Making MEng Thesis Award

• Laura Dodds for “A Portable Handheld Fine-Grained RFID Localization System with Complex-Controlled Polarization”. Supervised by Fadel Adib.
• Veerapatr Yotamornsunthorn for “Decoding Invisible 3D Printed Tags with Convolutional Neural Networks”. Supervised by Stefanie Mueller.

J. Francis Reintjes Excellence in 6-A Industrial Practice Award

• Cooper Jones
• Jialan (Karen) Wang