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.

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.

EECS alumni Gene Luen Yang (CS B.A. '95) has been selected as the new national ambassador for Young People’s Literature. This literary ambassador program was created in 2008 “to raise national awareness of the importance of young people’s literature as it relates to literacy, education and the betterment of the lives of young people”. After graduating UC Berkeley in 1995, Yang went to work as a computer engineer for two years but came to the realization he was meant to teach. He left his job as an engineer to teach computer science at a high school. During this time he also wrote stories and began self-publishing comic books and in 2006 began winning awards and gaining notoriety for his graphic novels.

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.