Sophia Shao wins Anita Borg Early Career Award

EECS Assistant Professor Sophia Shao has won the Anita Borg Early Career Award (BECA) from the Computing Research Association’s Committee on Widening Participation in Computing Research (CRA-WP).

The BECA honors the late Anita Borg, a pioneering member of CRA-WP, and reflects her dedication to advancing women’s participation in computing research. This annual award recognizes outstanding computer science and engineering achievements by a woman who has made substantial research contributions and has also demonstrated a significant impact on the profession, particularly through outreach to women.

Shao’s research focuses on computer architecture, with specific interests in domain-specific architecture, deep-learning accelerators, and high-productivity hardware design methodology. Before she arrived at Berkeley, Shao was a Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA after earning her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2016.

Shao has received several prestigious accolades for her work, including the Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, the 2022 IEEE TCCA Young Computer Architect Award, an Intel Rising Star Faculty Award, a Google Research Scholar Award, and the inaugural Dr. Sudhakar Yalamanchili Award.