EECS alumna Andrea Goldsmith (B.A. ’86/M.S. ’91/Ph.D. ’94, advisor: Pravin Varaiya), who was named Berkeley EE Distinguished Alumna in 2018, has been named dean of Princeton University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.  Goldsmith has been a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford since 1999 and is a leader in the fields of information theory and communications. She helped lay the mathematical foundations for increasing the capacity, speed and range of wireless systems, and among her 29 patents are many inventions central to cell phone and Wi-Fi networks.  Earlier this month, Goldsmith became the first woman to win the Marconi Prize, said to be the highest honor in telecommunications research.  She has also been active in efforts to increase diversity in STEM fields and is the founding chair of the IEEE Board of Directors Committee on Diversity, Inclusion and Ethics.  When she starts her tenure as dean in September, she will oversee a school comprising six departments and four research centers, including new initiatives in bioengineering, data science and robotics, among others.

Freshly-graduate CS Ph.D. student Daniel J. Fremont (advisor: Sanjit Seshia) has won the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Embedded Systems (SIGBED) Paul Caspi Memorial Dissertation Award for his thesis on "Algorithmic Improvisation."  The award, which was established in 2013, recognizes outstanding doctoral dissertations that significantly advance the state of the art in the science of embedded systems.  Fremont's thesis proposes a theory of algorithmic improvisation to enable the correct-by-construction synthesis of randomized systems, and explores its applications to safe autonomy.

EECS Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy has won the 2020 NCWIT Pioneer in Tech Award which "recognizes technical women whose lifetime contributions have significantly impacted the landscape of technological innovation, amplifying the importance of capitalizing on the diverse perspectives that girls and women can bring to the table. "   Bajcsy pioneered a new area of study within the field of robotics called Active Perception and was the first to argue that robots should be able to autonomously control the movements of their own sensors and other apparatus for interacting with their environment. She  is known for creating the  first 3D computer atlas of the human brain, which revolutionized brain surgery by allowing doctors to more accurately locate tumors.  Bajcsy also pioneered the process of elastic matching "in which computers match defined points in the human body with standardized medical images, enabling non-invasive diagnostics of the brain and other organs."  Like other winners of the award, Bajcsy serves as a role model whose legacy continues "to inspire generations of young women to pursue computing and make history in their own right."

EE Prof. in Residence Yi Ma has been selected to be a 2020 Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).    SIAM Fellows are members of SIAM "who have made outstanding contributions to fields" served by the SIAM community.  Ma was recognized "for contributions to the theory and algorithms for low-dimensional models and their applications in computer vision and image processing."

Berkeley Electrical Engineering ranked #1, and Computer Engineering ranked #2, in the 2021 US News and World Report graduate school rankings.  EE tied with MIT and Stanford as the top graduate Electrical/Electronic/Communications Engineering program in the nation, while Computer Engineering tied in second place with Stanford after MIT.  It should be noted that tuition for both MIT's and Stanford's Master's programs come to over $53.4K annually, while Berkeley's costs $11.4K in-state and $26.5 out-of-state per year.   Berkeley was ranked as the third best Engineering school overall.

Ruzena Bajcsy has won a 2020 RISE! Women Leader Award from the UC Berkeley Gender Equity Resource Center in the Division of Equity and Inclusion.  RISE! Leader Awards highlight "the exceptional endeavors and efforts of women leaders as they continue to support and empower our community of Berkeley women through their participation and representation" and recognize women who have demonstrated "strong leadership, care and love for the community, as well as, inspired resilience in other women."  Bajcsy was honored at the RISE! Celebrating Women, Community Love and Leadership celebration on March 4th.

EE Prof. and alumnus Chenming Hu (M.S. '70, Ph.D. '73), who won the 2020 IEEE Medal of Honor, has chosen to donate his $50K prize to the EECS department.   Hu, who was cited “for a distinguished career of developing and putting into practice semiconductor models, particularly 3D device structures, that have helped keep Moore’s Law going over many decades," is also the subject of an IEEE Spectrum article.  He was hired on the Berkeley faculty in 1976 and has been called the "Father of the 3D Transistor" due to his development of the Fin Field Effect Transistor in 1999.  Intel, the first company to implement FinFETs in its products, called the invention the most radical shift in semiconductor technology in more than 50 years.

Prof. Emeritus Leon O. Chua has been awarded the 2020 Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics.  Chua has contributed to cellular neural and nonlinear networks, nanoelectronics, nonlinear circuits and systems, nonlinear dynamics, bifurcation theory, and chaos theory. In 1971, he postulated a passive component named the memristor as the 4th passive electronic device derived from fundamental considerations.  37 years later, this device--with as predicted electrical characteristics--was experimentally found by a team at HP in 2008.  The award, which recognizes researchers who have made an outstanding and innovative contribution to the field of applied physics, comes with a prize of $5K and will be presented at the Magnus-Haus in Berlin, Germany on 18 September 2020.  The presentation will be accompanied by a public lecture given by Chua.

Assistant Profs. Aditya Parameswaran and Sanjam Garg hav been selected 2020 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellows in Computer Science.  These awards recognize distinguished performance by young American scientists who show "unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field."   Parameswaran develops systems for "human-in-the-loop" data analytics, and Garg's research interests are in cryptography and security.  As two of the nine UC Berkeley researchers to win the highly competitive fellowship this year, they will each receive a $75,000 award.

Valerie Taylor (EECS Ph.D. '91, advisor: David Messerschmitt), one of the winners of the 2020 EE Distinguished Alumni Award to be presented next week, is also the subject of our February EECS 150W profile in honor of Black History Month.  Taylor grew up in a STEM-forward family and attended Purdue before coming to Berkeley for her doctorate.    She had never seen a black woman professor before she began teaching at Northwestern University in 1992.  She is now the Director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory (where she is a Distinguished Fellow), and the Executive Director of the Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in IT (CMD-IT).  Her honors include the CRA A. Nico Habermann Award and the  Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award.