11 EECS graduate students have been awarded National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships (NSF GRFP). In EE they are Sidney Douglas Buchbinder, Regina Eckert, Laura Hallock, Sang Min Han, Michael Kellman, Efthymios Papageorgiou and Margaret Payne. In CS they are Abhishek Gupta, Grant Ho, Ethan Jackson and Gregory Kahn. The NSF GRFP program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited US institutions. Fellows benefit from a three-year annual stipend of $34,000 along with a $12,000 cost of education allowance for tuition and fees.

Prof. Michael Jordan has been selected to receive the 2016 IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence) Research Excellence Award. The Research Excellence award is given to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality yielding several substantial results. Professor Jordan is recognized for his groundbreaking and impactful research in both the theory and application of statistical machine learning.

Prof. Costas Spanos has been selected to receive the 2016 Distinguished Faculty Mentor Award and Assistant Prof. Laura Waller has been selected to receive the 2016 Graduate Student Mentoring Award Junior Faculty. Nominated by faculty colleagues and current and former graduate students, the award recipients have demonstrated an outstanding commitment to helping UC Berkeley graduates to succeed academically, professionally, and personally. The award ceremony will be held April 13, 2016 in the Anna Head Alumnae Hall.

EECS alumna Diane Greene (Computer Science M.S. ’88) was ranked #1 of 26 most powerful female engineers in 2016 by Business Insider. Greene was a co-founder of VMware that sold to EMC for $635M. She then went on to become a big angel investor while working on her new startup BeBop, which Google bought for $380M while she was on the board at Google. Greene is currently running Google’s cloud computing business and on the boards of Intuit and MIT. She is also recipient of the 2016 EECS Distinguished Alumni Award in Computer Science and will be this year's CS commencement speaker.

The latest rankings from U.S. News & World Report, “America’s Best Graduate Schools 2017” has placed our Electrical Engineering program at #1, tied with Stanford and MIT, and our “Computer Engineering” program ranked #2, tied with Stanford. For the U.S. News rankings of graduate engineering programs, 215 engineering schools that grant doctoral degrees were surveyed.

Prof. Bernhard Boser has been selected to receive the 2016 NSF I/UCRC (National Science Foundation Industry & University Cooperative Research Program) Alex Schwarzkopf prize. This prize recognizes an individual or team whose research is judged to have made the greatest contribution to technological innovation.

EECS alumnus Srinivas Devadas has been named a 2016 MacVicar Faculty Fellow. The MacVicar Faculty Fellows Program honors MIT’s best teachers and mentors, who have made outstanding contributions to undergraduate education. Prof. Devadas is currently the Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and has been on the MIT EECS faculty since 1988.

Prof. Dan Garcia has been selected to receive a National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT) 2016 Undergraduate Research Mentoring (URM) Award. This award recognizes Academic Alliance representatives at non-profit U.S. Institutions for their outstanding mentorship, high-quality research opportunities, recruitment of women and minority students, and efforts to encourage and advance undergraduates in computing-related fields.

Kay Ousterhout recently won the Google Ph.d. Fellowship. This is one of the highest honors a CS grad student can win. It is extremely selective, with only a small number universities invited to submit two nominees each. Kay is a 5th year student of Prof. Sylvia Ratnasamy. The Google Phd Fellowship was created in 2009 to recognize and support outstanding graduate students doing exceptional work in Computer Science (CS) and related disciplines.

Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy and her team have been selected for a 2016-17 award from the Signatures Innovation Fellow Program. This program supports innovative research by UC Berkeley faculty on projects that hold commercial promise and supports visionary faculty entrepreneurs and leadership teams on their journey to building great companies. Prof. Bajcsy’s project is Individualized Human Modeling for Medical Diagnosis and Prescription of Assistive Devices.