EECS and Bioengineering Prof. Steven Conolly has been awarded the 2022 U.C. Berkeley Bakar Prize.  This prize is given annually to former Bakar Program Fellows whose technological innovations promise to deliver solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems.  Funds are provided to help new technologies transition from an academic setting to industrial applications.  The objective of Conolly's project, titled Rapid in vivo optimization of solid tumor CAR-T cell therapies using advanced magnetic particle imaging (MPI),  is to determine whether a particular CAR-T cell cancer immunotherapy is working in hours rather than months.  CAR-T cells are tagged with safe magnetic nanoparticles before a treatment is administered so that oncologists can view how well they are targeting cancer cells using high resolution imaging technology.

EE alumnus Colin Parris (M.S. '87, Ph.D. '94, advisor: Domenico Ferrari) has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).  After a career at IBM Systems & Technology and General Electric (GE) Research, Parris is currently Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at GE.  He is known for his life-long commitment to "the development and enhancement of STEM programs across minority communities," and serves as a board member of the Annual Multicultural Business Youth Educational Services Embarkment (Ambyese), which prepares multicultural secondary school students for the challenges of pursuing careers in the corporate sector through self-esteem-building and exposure to successful role models in industry.  While a student Berkeley, Parris helped start the Summer Undergraduate Program in Engineering Research at Berkeley (SUPERB) and was deeply involved with the group Black Graduate Engineering and Science Students (BGESS).  At GE, Parris, whose expertise spans engineering, software, and AI-driven analytics, leads teams that leverage digital technologies in the energy industry and other industrial environments.  He created and leads the Digital Twin Initiative company-wide and is currently working to "accelerate business impact and transformation by combining lean principles with digital solutions."

CS Prof. Emeritus and Prof. in the Graduate School Scott Shenker has won the 2022 UC Berkeley Fiat Lux Faculty Award.  This achievement award, which is co-presented by the UC Berkeley Foundation and the Cal Alumni Association, recognizes a "faculty member whose extraordinary contributions go above and beyond the call of duty to advance the university’s philanthropic mission and transform its research, teaching, and programs."  Shenker, who is the Research Director of Extensible Internet at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), is known for his research contributions in the areas of energy-efficient processor scheduling, resource sharing, and software-defined networking.  He is a leader in the software-defined networking (SDN) technology movement and a co-founder of the open-source non-profit Open Networking Foundation (ONF), which sets standards and promotes SDN in anticipation of problems that arise when cloud computing blurs distinctions between computers and networks.  Shenker is also known for his philanthropic support of the university, including a donation of $25M toward the construction the new Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) building last June.  The award will be presented at the Berkeley charter Gala on May 12th.

EECS Prof. Katherine Yelick has won the 2022 CRA Distinguished Service Award.  This award recognizes "a person or organization that has made an outstanding service contribution" with a major impact "to the computing research community" in the areas of government, professional societies, publications, conferences, or leadership.  Yelick has been a professor in the department since 1991,  and was the Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).  She is known as the co-inventor of the UPC and Titanium languages and demonstrated their applicability through the use of novel runtime and compilation methods.  She also co-developed techniques for self-tuning numerical libraries.  She is the co-author of two books and more than 100 refereed technical papers on parallel languages, compilers, algorithms, libraries, architecture, and storage.

CS Assistant Prof. Avishay Tal has been selected as a 2022 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Computer Science.   This award recognizes outstanding early-career faculty for their "potential to revolutionize their fields of study."  Tal is a member of the Theory group;  his interests include computational complexity, analysis of boolean functions, circuit and formula lower bounds, query complexity, pseudorandomness, computational learning theory, quantum computing, combinatorics, and connections between algorithms and lower bounds.  He is among 4 winners from UC Berkeley representing the fields of CS, math, physics, and neuroscience.  Winners receive $75K, which may be spent over a two-year term to support their research.

Researchers from the Pilawa Research Group, including EECS alumnus Nathan Pallo (Ph.D. '21), EECS Associate Prof.  Robert Pilawa-Podgurski, and former postdoc Tomas Modeer, have won one of four 1st place 2020 IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) Transactions Prize Paper Awards.   Their paper, which was co-authored by Pilawa-Podgurski's UIUC graduate students, Tom Foulkes and Chris Barth,  is titled "Design of a GaN-Based Interleaved Nine-Level Flying Capacitor Multilevel Inverter for Electric Aircraft Applications." This award is considered the top publication award in the field of power electronics, and is known for it's rigorous evaluation process, which recognizes "originality; contribution to the field; extent to which the paper is supported by analysis and experimental evidence; and quality of presentation, including the effective use of illustrations."  The winners of the 2020 award were selected from a pool of 1,148 papers.

CS Prof. and alumna Marti Hearst (B.A. '85/M.S. '89/Ph.D. '94, advisor: Robert Wilensky) has been named the new head of school for UC Berkeley's School of Information (iSchool).   Hearst, who was the iSchool's first assistant professor in 1997, is taking over the position from CS Prof. Hany Farid.  She will manage the day-to-day operations of the unit, which is an affiliate of the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS),  and communicate its vision on and off campus.  Hearst is known for her work automating sentiment analysis and word sense disambiguation. She invented an algorithm known as “Hearst Patterns," which is used in commercial text mining operations, and developed a now commonly-used automatic text segmentation approach called TextTiling.   She will serve as head of school through June 30, 2023.

EECS Associate Prof. Aditya Parameswaran has been selected to receive the Young Alumni Achievers Award from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay.  This award "recognizes and celebrates the outstanding achievements of [IIT's] young alumni in their chosen field of endeavor."  Parameswaran, who has a joint appointment at the I School, synthesizes techniques from data systems and human-computer interaction to develop tools to simplify data science at scale.  His tools, which have been downloaded and employed by millions of users, empower "individuals and teams to leverage and make sense of their large datasets more easily, efficiently, and effectively."  These include the Lux library, an intelligent visualization recommendation system for very large data sets in dataframe workflows, and Modin, a scalable dataframe system which applies database and distributed systems ideas to help run dataframe workloads faster.  The award will be presented during the university's Institute Foundation Day Function on March 10, 2022.

EECS Associate Prof. Sergey Levine, Assistant Prof. Nilah Ioannidis, and alumna Dorsa Sadigh have won 2022 Okawa Research Grants.  These grants recognize "studies and analyses in the fields of information and telecommunications." Levine is doing research on "Offline Reinforcement Learning: Robust and Reliable Decisions from Data," Ioannidis is working on "Genome-Scale Learning of Molecular Phenotypes for Personal Genome Interpretation," and Sadigh, who is now an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, is studying "Adaptive Human-Robot Interaction."  They comprise three of the seven U.S. recipients who were awarded $10K grants this year.

EECS alumnus, Professor in the Graduates School,  and EE Prof. Emeritus Edward A. Lee (Ph.D. 1986, advisor: David Messerschmitt) has won the 2022 European Design and Automation Association (EDAA) Achievement Award.  This award recognizes individuals who have "made outstanding contributions to the state of the art in electronic design, automation and testing of electronic systems" over the course of their lifetimes, and whose innovative contributions have "had an impact on the way electronic systems are being designed."  Lee is known for his advocacy of deterministic models for the engineering of cyber-physical systems.  He led the Ptolemy Project, which developed Ptolemy II, an influential open-source model-based design and simulation tool which was used as the basis for the Kepler scientific workflow system.  He is a principal investigator for the Berkeley Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems Research Center (iCyPhy), which conducts "pre-competitive research on architectures and design, modeling, and analysis techniques for cyber-physical systems, with emphasis on industrial applications."  Lee has also written several books, including textbooks on embedded systems and digital communications, as well as books for general audiences that explore the relationship between technology and people.