News & Events

Honors & Awards

Northwestern Computer Science faculty and students are recognized for their accomplishments in research, teaching, and more. Read below for a sampling of recent accomplishments and honors received by faculty and students.

Northwestern CS also gives internal department awards to faculty, students, and staff who have shown excellence and service within the department. View Department Awards.

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• 2021 Awards and Accomplishments
• 2020 Awards and Accomplishments

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.

Student/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. 
• 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."

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.