Newly minted CSE Ph.D. Jeremy Blackstone has trekked back to his undergraduate roots at Howard University, this time as a professor. Before that journey, he was part of CSE Professor Ryan Kastner’s research group and a member of the Engineers for Exploration (E4E). Blackstone was a member of the first Engineers for Exploration (E4E) Summer REU program in Summer 2013 when he was an undergraduate at Howard University. He returned to UC San Diego to work on the Tinker project. He was funded to participate in the summer research programs as part of the UC San Diego Howard Partnership for Graduate Success — a UC HBCU-funded initiative.
Bridget Benson (Ph.D. ’10) is now an Associate Professor at Cal Poly SLO.
Tom Ristenpart (Ph.D. ’10), an associate professor at Cornell Tech, was honored with two distinguished paper awards at the Usenix Security Symposium.
Alexandra Boldyreva, a professor at Georgia Tech, has won a PKC Test of Time Award for work she completed as a CSE Ph.D. student in 2003.
Kaiser Stefan Pister (B.A. ’18, M.S. ’19) is part of a team that is launching a new product called Newsie. A web page reader powered by AI voices, Newsie seeks to improve accessibility to the Internet for the visually impaired. Newsie comes a year after the team’s first product, called Audiodub, which uses AI to translate video content to allow creators to share their work with the entire world. Both products were created with the intention of breaking down barriers and connecting people of all backgrounds and abilities.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) India Council has honored Ranjita Bhagwan (Ph.D. ’04) with the inaugural 2020 ACM India Outstanding Contributions in Computing by a Woman Award. The award recognizes women professionals who have made fundamental contributions to computing in India.
Didem Unat (Ph.D. ’12), now an assistant professor at Koc University in Turkey, was awarded a prestigious €1.5 million ERC Starting Grant for her project, BeyondMoore: Pioneering a New Path in Parallel Programming Beyond Moore’s Law.
After completing his doctorate, Joseph Jaeger (Ph.D. ’19) has gone on to a postdoc appointment at the University of Washington and earned accolades with a Best Paper by Early Career Researchers Award at Crypto 2020.
Do you have an achievement you’d like to share with your CSE community? Let us know! cse-communications@eng.ucsd.edu
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