It is with sadness to announce that Prof. Chitoor V. Ramamoorthy (“Ram”) passed away on Thursday, March 10 at UCSD’s Thornton Hospital. All extended family members and friends are being directed to a workshop which will be held on May 5th in La Jolla for a memorial: www.TransKS.org. Sympathy cards may be sent to Mrs. Ramamoorthy at 558 Blackhawk Club Drive, Danville, CA 94506. Donations may be directed to the C.V. Ramamoorthy Distinguished Research Award.

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.

Prof. Jeff Bokor is featured in a Berkeley News article titled “Experiments show magnetic chips could dramatically increase computing’s energy efficiency”. As computing increasingly moves into “the cloud”, electricity demands of the giant cloud data centers are multiplying, collectively taking an increasing share of this country’s and the world’s electrical grid. Prof. Bokor and UC Berkeley researchers have shown for the first time that magnetic chips can actually operate at the lowest fundamental energy dissipation theoretically possible under the laws of thermodynamics.

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.

EECS alumni Rick Garcia and Prof. Avideh Zakhor won the best paper award at the SPIE Electronic Imaging Conference on 3D Image Processing measurement. Their paper titled “Markerless Motion Capture With Multi-view Structured Light” is also the title of Rick’s Ph.D. thesis.

A special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE, the most highly cited general-interest journal in electrical engineering and computer science, on the evolution of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and its future developments, features papers from a number of research groups in EECS. The issue, including Prof. Robert Brayton and Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli as guest editors, has brought together for the first time multiple perspectives on the future of EDA and the challenges ahead. The significant contributions from EECS professors, students, and alumni witness the groundbreaking, continuous role of Berkeley EECS faculty and students in shaping the field.

The Level Playing Field Institute (LPFI) honored Teaching Prof. Dan Garcia as a Tech Diversity Champion at their Annual Fairness Matters Forum 2015 held at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco. LPFI is committed to eliminating the barriers faced by underrepresented people of color in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and fostering their untapped talent for the advancement of our nation. This event focused on the progress toward diversifying tech and celebrated those who are working to create a more inclusive tech ecosystem.

EECS Prof. Emeritus and alumni (Ph.D. ’69) Charles Shank is one of two scientists to receive the Enrico Fermi Award, one of the federal government’s oldest and most prestigious awards for scientific achievement. He was also director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 1989-2004. Prof. Shank is recognized for “the seminal development of ultrafast lasers and their application in many areas of scientific research, for visionary leadership of national scientific and engineering research communities, and for exemplary service supporting the National Laboratory complex.”