Berkeleyan

Laurels
Celebrating Berkeley's blue ribbons, gold stars, and honorable mentions

02 April 2008

On the day he became the first director of Berkeley's new Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers, David Patterson received a second honor: the 2007 Distinguished Service Award, given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery for "service to the computing community." A former ACM president and a Berkeley faculty member in computer science since 1977, Patterson holds the Pardee Chair on campus, and was a founder of the Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed Systems Laboratory (RAD Lab), which focuses on the design of more dependable computing systems. He has also co-authored five books on computer architecture.

Carnegie Mellon University's second annual Katayanagi Prize for Research Excellence - the inaugural prize went to the aforementioned David Patterson - has been awarded to Christos Papadimitriou, the campus's C. Lester Hogan Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. The prize is awarded to "an established researcher with a record of outstanding, sustained achievement," and carries an honorarium of $20,000. Papadimitriou, who joined the Berkeley faculty in 1996, is an internationally recognized expert on the theory of algorithms and complexity and the author of five books, including Computational Complexity, a widely used textbook, and Turing, a novel. In connection with his award, he is scheduled to deliver a lecture at Carnegie Mellon on April 10 and at the Tokyo University of Technology in May.

The professional association formerly known as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers - and now officially called IEEE - has announced that two faculty members will be recognized at its September awards ceremony in Quebec. Paul Gray, who served as the campus's executive vice chancellor and provost from 2000 to 2006 and is now an emeritus professor who holds the Andrew S. Grove Chair in Electrical Engineering, has won the 2008 Robert N. Noyce Medal "for pioneering the development of analog circuits," the organization said. And the nonprofit's Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award goes to EECS professor Alan Smith, who was cited "for contributions to the performance analysis of computer storage systems, including improvements to disk caches, prefetching, and data placement."

M. Kathryn Scott, the director of Berkeley's Physical Education Program, has received the Phyllis A. Blatz Exemplary Leadership Award, one of the highest honors given by the California Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance. Scott, a CAHPERD member for 20 years who has served as its legislative chair as well as its president, has "worked tirelessly - and successfully - to inform the state Board of Education about important matters relating to physical education and health education" for over 20 years, the organization said, among her many contributions on behalf of physical education and health in California.