An ongoing list of 2023 accolades and research awards received by Baskin Engineering faculty, students, and staff.
Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Yu Zhang, Ph.D. student Shourya Bose, and visiting researcher Qiuling Yang won first place at the Learning to Run a Power Network – Delft 2023 Competition. They leveraged cutting-edge tools of AI+Optimization+Control to robustly operate electrical power grids.
David Bernick, associate teaching professor of biomolecular engineering, received the Hartnell College STEM Internship Partner Award for his work in creating internship opportunities for Hartnell College students to pursue synthetic biology research with the UCSC iGEM team.
Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Lise Getoor won the ’10 Year Award’ for her paper on Knowledge Graph Identification at the 2023 International Semantic Web Conference.
“Establishing Servingness in Computing through Baskin Engineering Excellence Scholars Program,” a joint project between eight community colleges and Baskin Engineering Professor Seshadhri Comandur, UC Santa Cruz Education Professor Kip Téllez, UCSC staff member Carmen Robinson, and former Baskin Engineering Assistant Professor Narges Norouzi, who is now an assistant teaching professor at UC Berkeley, has received a ~$2M NSF award.
Mark Akeson and David Deamer, emeriti research professors of biomolecular engineering, have received the UC Santa Cruz Chancellor’s Lifetime Achievement in Innovation Award for their work in revolutionizing DNA sequencing through nanopore sequencing technology, which was first developed over 25 years ago and licensed to Oxford Nanopore Technologies. Thanks to their pioneering work that led to the development of a fast, portable, and affordable sequencing tool, known as the MinION, researchers around the world have been able to make some of the most significant genomics advances of our time, including the completion of the first-ever gapless sequence of a human genome.
Russell Corbett-Detig, associate professor of biomolecular engineering, has received the UC Santa Cruz Chancellor’s Innovator of the Year Award for his software tool UShER, which is now the primary method used by health officials across the globe to track the spread of COVD-19 variants.
Jason Eshraghian, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, has been awarded the German Association for Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (GAMM) 2023 Sustainability Award for his publication, “Spiking neural networks for nonlinear regression.” This award recognizes outstanding contribution to the field of applied mathematics and mechanics with a focus on sustainability.
Colleen Josephson, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, received the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research’s (FFAR) 2022 New Innovator in Food & Agriculture Research Award. The $450K in funding will support Josephson’s research in developing efficient, low-cost agricultural soil sensor systems that are powered by mud batteries—microbial fuel cells that harness the energy of bacteria in soil.
Steve Kang, distinguished professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering, his former students, and Jason Eshraghian, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, received the 2023 IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems Darlington Best Paper Award for their paper, “How to build a memristive integrate-and-fire model for spiking neuronal signal generation.”
Reese Levine, a computer science and engineering Ph.D. student, and Assistant Professors of Computer Science and Engineering Tyler Sorensen and Andrew Quinn received both a Distinguished Paper Award and Distinguished Artifact Award at the ASPLOS 2023 Conference for their publication titled, “MC Mutants: Evaluating and Improving Testing for Memory Consistency Specifications.”
Karen Miga, assistant professor of biomolecular engineering, has been named a 2023 Searle Scholar. This prestigious award will support her research in studying regions of the genome that have been previously unexplored due to their complexity.
A Baskin Engineering student team won the Small Farm Prize at the 2023 Farm Robotics Challenge, an inaugural competition that tasked student teams to develop robotic farming solutions for on-farm challenges.
A team of six UC Santa Cruz Baskin School of Engineering undergraduate students, mentored by Assistant Professor Scott Beamer and graduate student Nilesh Negi, placed second in the third annual Winter Classic Invitational, a virtual cluster (supercomputing) competition for students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). This is the second time UCSC competed in the Winter Classic Invitational, having placed third in the 2021 inaugural event.
Another UCSC supercomputing team, mentored by Assistant Professor Scott Beamer and Ph.D. student Yiwei Yang, placed second in the ISC 2023 Student Cluster Competition, an international supercomputing competition geared toward students with prior supercomputing experience. Team UCSC was one of only two American teams selected to compete in this year’s ISC
A team of 10 Baskin School of Engineering students, who are a part of the UCSC Slug Security Club, placed second out of 80 teams in the MITRE Embedded Capture the Flag (eCTF) Competition, a unique two-part cybersecurity challenge that involves participants designing a secure embedded system and then analyzing and attacking the designs of competitors to earn points. This was the first time UC Santa Cruz competed in the competition.
Two UC Santa Cruz teams, Redwood Bio and WakoAI, have been selected into CITRIS Foundry’s spring 2023 cohort. The 12-month program offers entrepreneurs time, resources, and space to develop their innovative ideas into startups ready to seek venture capital funding.
Kevin Bowden, a computer science and engineering Ph.D. student, received the Best Paper Award at the 13th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems Technology (IWSDS) for his publication, “Let’s Get Personal: Personal Questions Improve SocialBot Performance in the Alexa Prize.” The paper details the open-domain conversational system, Athena, developed by Baskin Engineering students for the Amazon Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge.
Angela Brooks, associate professor of biomolecular engineering, was awarded the Outstanding Research and Professional Mentor Award from the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics & Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), for her “demonstrated record of encouraging historically underrepresented minority students or professionals to pursue advanced degrees in a science, technology, engineering, mathematics or a related field.”
Sesh Comandur, professor of computer science and engineering, will give the Invited International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT) Lecture during the week of March 28, 2023. The ICDT is a prestigious conference on research in the foundations and theory of data management.
J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves, distinguished professor of computer science and engineering, was named a 2022 Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) on December 8, 2022.
Additionally, Garcia-Luna-Aceves was recently awarded the 2023 IEEE Harry H. Goode Memorial Award “for significant and pioneering contributions to algorithms, protocols, and architectures for routing in computer networks and the internet.”
Lise Getoor, distinguished professor of computer science and engineering, received the distinction of 2022 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) “for distinguished contributions to machine learning, particularly for approaches that integrate structure and uncertainty.”
Reese Levine, a computer science and engineering Ph.D. student, and Assistant Professors of Computer Science and Engineering Tyler Sorensen and Andrew Quinn received both a Distinguished Paper Award and Distinguished Artifact Award at the ASPLOS 2023 Conference for their publication titled, “MC Mutants: Evaluating and Improving Testing for Memory Consistency Specifications.”
Ann McCartney, a research scientist at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, was awarded the National Human Genome Research Institute’s (NHGRI) inaugural Staff Award for DEIA Innovation in the Genomics Workforce for her commitment to equity in scientific research, particularly in advancing genomic data sharing and management and responsible research practices.
Kate Ringland, assistant professor of computational media, was awarded a Hellman Fellowship to support her research towards understanding how to design and develop self-sustaining social media technology for and with marginalized communities. This work focuses on the experiences of marginalized communities, with an emphasis on disabled community members, to understand how technology enables new modes of engagement and how play functions as a crucial site of care and social support for underserved groups.
Tyler Sorensen, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, received an NSF CAREER Award to support his research in developing the logical frameworks and mathematical models required to enable diverse processors to work together.
Haoyuan Wang, a computer science and engineering Ph.D. student, and Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Scott Beamer received a Distinguished Paper Award at the ASPLOS 2023 Conference for their publication titled, “RepCut: Superlinear Parallel RTL Simulation with Replication-Aided Partitioning.”
Alexander Wolf, distinguished professor of computer science and engineering and dean of the Baskin School of Engineering, received the distinction of 2022 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) “for research in distributed system software engineering, and for service to the professional computing community.”
Yuyin Zhou, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, was awarded a Hellman Fellowship to support her research on building federated learning systems in the presence of imperfect supervision, where annotations are scarce, incomplete, weak, or noisy. The research will enable collaborative machine learning model training in medical imaging, aiming to enhance accuracy and robustness while safeguarding data privacy and impacting various scientific fields, particularly healthcare.
Through the combined efforts of more than 80 students, advised by Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Alvaro Cardenas, UC Santa Cruz placed third out of 445 universities at the 2022 National Security Agency (NSA) Codebreaker Challenge.
