News & Events

Honors & Awards

The Northwestern CS community is recognized for their accomplishments in research, teaching, mentorship, and more.

External Faculty Awards and Recognition

Our faculty is honored to receive awards and recognition from external organizations, including the Association for Computing Machinery, Computing Research Association, and the National Science Foundation.

Northwestern University Awards

CS faculty also receive interal honors from Northwestern University.

Department Awards

Northwestern CS bestows internal department awards to faculty, students, and staff for excellence and service within the department.

A sampling of recent accomplishments and honors received by faculty and students is listed below:

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• 2025 Awards and Accomplishments
• 2024 Awards and Accomplishments
• 2023 Awards and Accomplishments
• 2022 Awards and Accomplishments
• 2021 Awards and Accomplishments
• 2020 Awards and Accomplishments

2025 Awards and Accomplishments

Faculty and Staff Awards

• Karan Ahuja and the Google Android XR team won an ACM SIGCHI Special Recognition Award for pioneering the interaction framework of the operating system through exemplary industry-academia collaboration. Ahuja also received a Ryan Family Research Acceleration Fund award to develop scalable, accessible motion-capture technology to revolutionize consumer health monitoring.
• Nivedita Arora was named an ‘Emerging Rockstar’ by IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine.
• Elizabeth Gerber was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy Class of 2025 for remarkable contributions to the field of human-computer interaction.
• A team including Han Liu and PhD student Zhenyu Pan was selected for a 2025 NVIDIA Academic Grant Program award for their project "Interactive Spatial Reasoning and 3D Scene Generation with RL-Enhanced VLM."
• Xiao Wang was awarded a 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Student and Alumni Awards

• Brian Chen, Kevin Hayes, Sean Rhee, and Marko Veljanovski received honorable mentions in the Computer Research Association 2024-2025 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award competition.
• PhD Student Rashna Kumar won a 2025 Internet Society Pulse Research Fellowship.
• PhD student David Matthews (advised by Sam Kriegman) was awarded a US NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

2024 Awards and Accomplishments

Faculty and Staff Awards

• Emma Alexander was selected to participate in the Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering 2024 Symposium.
• Karan Ahuja earned a 2024 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Outstanding Dissertation Award, which recognizes excellent dissertation research in human-computer interaction. Ahuja was also named to the Forbes "30 Under 30 Asia 2024" list in the “Healthcare and Science” category.
• Nikos Hardavellas was named to the inaugural cohort of Future Computing Research Association (CRA) Leaders.
• Sara Owsley Sood was named a 2024 recipient of The Alumnae of Northwestern University’s Award for Curriculum Innovation. Sood's curricular innovation project was inspired and led by undergraduate student interest in raising awareness about the need to consider the ethical implications of technology.
• Uri Wilensky was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• Marcelo Worsley was named a research fellow with the Jacobs Foundation to support his work helping students learn computer science through sports.

Student and Alumni Awards

• The “MREEOWWW” team won seventh place in the 2024 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) Mid-Central USA Regional Contest, held in November. Members included Maxwell Chen, a second-year student in computer science; Ryan Liu, a second-year student pursuing a double major in computer science and mathematics; and Milind Maiti, a second-year student in computer science. Phawin Prongpaophan, a PhD student in the Northwestern CS Theory Group, coached the team.
• Nadharm Dhiantravan, Joel Goh, Marko Veljanovski, and Garrett Weil received honorable mentions in the Computer Research Association 2023-2024 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award competition.
• Monisola Jayeoba, a third-year PhD student in Northwestern’s Technology and Social Behavior program, was awarded an American Association of University Women (AAUW) International Fellowship.
• PhD students Taylor Olson and Lixu Wang have been awarded IBM PhD Fellowships in recognition of their demonstrated academic excellence and innovative research.
• A Northwestern Networks Group team, including computer science PhD students Yunming Xiao and Sen Lin, earned the Best Student Paper Award at the EuroSys 2024 conference.

2023 Awards and Accomplishments

Faculty and Staff Awards

• Brenna Argall was elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering’s (AIMBE) College of Fellows.
• Christos Dimoulas and Xiao Wang received Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
• Kristian Hammond was elected a 2023 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Fellow.
• Michael Horn received a 2023 Daniel I. Linzer Award for Faculty Excellence in Diversity and Equity.
• Samir Khuller was elevated to an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow and was also elected to the Computing Research Association (CRA) Board of Directors for a three-year term.
• Qi Zhu received Design for Environmental Sustainablity in Computing Program (DESC) from the National Sciene Foundation. 
• Seda Ogrenci received a Phase 2 NSF Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems award with a multi-institution team.

Joint Faculty and Student Awards

• Emma Alexander, Sarah Van Wart, and Northwestern Computer Science student tutors are supporting efforts towards more equitable communities with the YWCA Evanston/North Shore through a Racial Equity and Community Partnership grant awarded by Northwestern’s Office of Neighborhood and Community Relations.

Student and Alumni Awards

• PhD alum Modibo Camara, who was jointly advised by Jason Hartline and Eddie Dekel, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Economics at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, won the 2022 ACM SIGecom Doctoral Dissertation Award.
• PhD student Melissa Chen (advised by Eleanor O'Rourke) was awarded a Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W) Computer Science Research Conference Scholarship to attend the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) Technical Symposium 2023 in March.
• Amil Dravid was named a finalist in the national Computer Research Association (CRA) 2023 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards.
• PhD students Lily Ge (advised by Matthew Kay) and Mara Ulloa (advised by Maia Jacobs) were awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowships.
• The competitive programming “ispc team” - Felix Haba, Nikhil Kalghatgi, and Chi Li - won third place in the Mid-Central Regional International Collegiate Programming Contest and advances to the 2023 ICPC North America Championship. The team is coached by postdoctoral scholar Quanquan Liu and Professor Konstantin Makarychev.
• PhD student Vaidehi Srinivas (advised by Aravindan Vijayaraghavan) received a Presidential Fellowship, the most prestigious fellowship awarded to graduate students by Northwestern University.
• PhD student Mara Ulloa (advised by Maia Jacobs) received a Social Justice Mini-Grant through the Graduate School (TGS) Office of Diversity and Inclusion (ODI) to support her collaboration with We All Code (WAC), a volunteer-run, 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that offers free educational resources and hands-on coding classes in web, game, and app development to Chicago youth ages 7 to 17.

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2022 Awards and Accomplishments

Faculty and Staff Awards

• The undergraduate student body nominates Northwestern faculty members and administrators that made an exceptional impact on their academic journey for the Associated Student Government Faculty & Administrator Honor Roll. The following members of the CS community joined the 2021-22 academic year honor roll: Connor Bain, Melissa Duong, Matthew Easterday, Branden Ghena, Nikos Hardavellas, Ian Horswill, Sara Owsley Sood, and Vincent St-Amour.
• Elizabeth Gerber received the 2022 Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer–Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Social Impact Award.
• Professor Nikos Hardavellas received the best paper Award at the 2022 IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture for "SupermarQ: A Scalable Quantum Benchmark Suite."
• Josiah Hester received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. He also received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship and Northwestern’s Daniel I. Linzer Award for Faculty Excellence in Diversity and Equity.
• Aggelos Katsaggelos was elevated to a Life Fellow member by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
• Annie Liang received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award.
• Xiao Wang and collaborators won a Distinguished Paper Award for "Proving UNSAT in Zero Knowledge" at the 2022 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.
• Uri Wilensky was elected to the National Academy of Education.

Joint Faculty and Student Awards

• V.S. Subrahmanian and PhD student Sayak Chakrabarty won Best Paper Award at the 20th IEEE International Conference on Dependable, Autonomic & Secure Computing for the paper “A New Dynamically Changing Attack on Review Fraud Systems and a Dynamically Changing Ensemble Defense.” The paper was co-authored by former Northwestern CS postdoc Youzhi Zhang (Hong Kong Institute of Science & Innovation, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Rui Liu (Meta), and Andrea Pugliese (Università della Calabria).
• Team TUTELARY – Zhenpeng Lin, a third-year PhD student, Yueqi Chen, a visiting scholar with Northwestern CS, and Xinyu Xing – successfully demonstrated a use-after-free bug leading to elevation of privilege on Ubuntu Desktop at the Pwn2Own hacking contest. The team won a $40,000 prize.
• Qi Zhu and Zhilu Wang, a fifth-year PhD student in electrical and computer engineering, won a Best Paper Award in the Embedded Systems Design track at the Association for Computing Machinery/Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Design, Automation, and Test in Europe Conference 2022.

Student and Alumni Awards

• Carina Biar, an undergraduate student majoring in neuroscience with a minor in computer science, won a Barry Goldwater Scholarship. Biar is a peer mentor for the COMP_SCI 214: Data Structures and Algorithms course.
• Modibo Camara (PhD ’22), who was jointly advised by Jason Hartline and Eddie Dekel, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Economics at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, won the ACM SIGecom Best Paper with a Student Lead Author and an Exemplary Theory Track Award for his paper “Computationally Tractable Choice.”
• Jacob Kelter, a PhD candidate in the joint Computer Science and Learning Sciences Program through the School of Education and Social Policy and the McCormick School of Engineering, received a Presidential Fellowship, the most prestigious fellowship awarded to graduate students by Northwestern University.
• Alisa Liu (’20), currently a PhD student at the University of Washington, received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
• Ryan Louie, a sixth-year PhD student in the joint Technology and Social Behavior program with Northwestern's School of Communication, received a 2022 Google PhD Fellowship in Human Computer Interaction.
• Students in Northwestern Engineering’s Design, Technology, and Research (DTR) program earned top awards in the Undergraduate Category at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) 2022 Student Research Competition. Fardeem Munir, a fourth-year undergraduate in computer science at the McCormick School of Engineering, and Roxanna Wilcox ('22) won first place. Cindy Hu, a fourth-year undergraduate in computer science at Northwestern Engineering and in communication studies at Northwestern’s School of Communication, won second place.
• Ruiqi Pan ('22) was named McCormick School of Engineering’s 2022 Walter P. Murphy Cooperative Engineering Education Student of the Year. Pan plans to begin the master of computational data science program at Carnegie Mellon University in the fall.
• MS student Archana Ramasubramaniam and her team earned third place at the MIT Energy Hackathon event, held November 11-13, 2022.
• PhD student Nick Wanninger (advised by Peter Dinda) won the Best Artifact Award at EuroSys 2022.
• PhD candidate Yunming Xiao earned second place in the Hewlett Packard summer intern fair for project proposing a novel SmartNIC-aided control plane called Conspirator which can mitigate the various performance bottlenecks of today’s distributed machine learning workloads.
• Undergraduates Peter Zhong and Jay Zou received honorable mentions in the Computer Research Association 2022 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards.

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2021 Awards and Accomplishments

Faculty Awards

• Ken Forbus was named to the 2020 class of AAAS fellows.
• Zhaoran Wang received a prestigious NSF CAREER award.
• Eleanor O’Rourke received a $10,000 Google Systems Research Award in recognition of her work related to technical leadership and achievements in systems research. The award was given to seven female assistant professors conducting systems research.
• Josiah Hester won a 3M Non-Tenured Track Faculty Award, which recognizes junior faculty for excellence in research, exeperience, and academic leadership.

Joint Faculty and Student Awards

• Nikos Hardavellas and PhD candidate Haiyang Han received a best paper award nomination at the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED) for their paper titled "Pho$: A Case for Shared Optical Cache Hierarchies."
• PhD student Hugo Flores García, research assistant and undergraduate Aldo Aguilar, PhD candidate Ethan Manilow, and Professor Bryan Pardo won the Best Paper Award at the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Conference.
• Professor Xiao Wang and third-year PhD student Chenkai Weng won runner-up for Best Paper Award at the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control Conference on Computer and Communications Security.

Student and Alumni Awards

• Computer science undergraduates Michael Cuevas, Amil Dravid, Souradip Ghosh, and Elizabeth Petersen received honorable mentions in the Computer Research Association’s 2021 Oustanding Research Award Program.
• Amil Dravid (advised by Aggelos Katsaggelos) won a 2021 Goldwater Scholarship. 
• Souradip Ghosh ('21) received DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. He is currently a first-year PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University.
• PhD student Byungjin Jun (advised by Fabian Bustamante) won a Google PhD Fellowship.
• PhD candidates Harrison Kwik (co-advised by Eleanor O'Rourke and Haoqi Zhang) and Claire Lee (advised by Alok Choudhary) and alumni Jared Fernandez ('19), Sarah Lim ('18), and Emma McDonnell ('19) received NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) awards. The NSF GRFP "recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported STEM disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited U.S. institutions."

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2020 Awards and Accomplishments

Faculty Awards

Research

• Nabil Alshurafa and Josiah Hester earned major awards at UbiComp, a premier interdisciplinary venue for researchers, designers, developers, and practitioners of computing.
• A team including Xiao Wang is part of a group taking part in the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process, which investigates post-quantum society.

Teaching and Mentoring

• Russell Joseph received the University’s 2020 Cole-Higgins Award for outstanding teaching and advising.
• Ian Horswill was honored with a University Teaching Award for excellence and innovation in the classroom.
• Professor and Chair Samir Khuller received the 2020 CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award. The honor recognizes outstanding mentorship and guidance on admission and matriculation of students to research-focused graduate programs in computing.
• Stephen Tarzia and Sarah Van Wart were named 2020 recipients of The Alumnae of Northwestern University’s Award for Curriculum Innovation to support the development of new courses that incorporate ethics into the study of computer science.

Joint Faculty and Student Awards

• Peter Dinda, Alex Bernat, and Conor Hetland won best paper award at the 29th ACM Symposium on High-performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC 2020). Their paper, "Spying on the Floating Point Behavior of Existing, Unmodified Scientific Applications," describes a new open source tool, FPSpy, that detects anomalous floating point arithmetic behavior, and applies the tool to over 7 million lines of code.
• Jessica Hullman, Matthew Kay, and Alex Kale won best paper award at IEEE InfoVis this year for “Visual Reasoning Strategies for Effect Size Judgments and Decisions."

Student Awards

• Computer science undergraduates Michael Cuevas (advised by Peter Dinda), Amil Dravid (advised by Aggelos Katsaggelos), Souradip Ghosh (advised by Peter Dinda and Simone Campanoni) and Elizabeth Peterson (advised by Kris Hammond) received honorable mentions in the Computer Research Association’s 2021 Outstanding Research Award Program. 
• Rawan Alharbi, advised by Nabil Alshurafa, was invited to join the Rising Stars 2020 at UC Berkeley.
• PhD candidate Nicholas LaGrassa and incoming PhD candidate Nicholas Franzese were awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) award. PhD candidate Lukas Lazarek received an NSF GRFP honorable mention.
• Computer science undergraduates Ulyana Kurylo, Alisa Liu, and Maxine Whitely received honorable mentions in the Computer Research Association’s 2020 Outstanding Research Award Program.
• PhD candidates Connor Bain, Maxwell Crouse, and Yiding Feng received a Terminal Year Fellowship award for the 2020-21 academic year.

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