Dear fellow CSE alumni,

What a year it has been– for our UC San Diego and CSE communities and our world as we grapple with a global pandemic. I am truly inspired by the impactful work our alumni, students and faculty continued to produce under incredibly trying circumstances.

With the overnight switch to virtual learning, remote working and events, the CSE community pushed ahead, finding ways to connect and engage with alumni, students and faculty. I am proud of the resilience, dedication and passion to serve our alumni and students that I saw this last year.

To highlight a few examples:

• Our CSE Alumni Virtual Reunion, where we honored two distinguished alumni for their contributions in academia and industry: Darrell Long (Ph.D. ’88), a Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of California Santa Cruz, and Jeff Carter (B.A. ’86), the vice president overseeing relational database services at Amazon, were selected as the 2021 CSE Distinguished Alumni. The keynote was given by our own Oriol Vinyals (M.A. ’09), the principal scientist at DeepMind, and a team lead of the Deep Learning group. His internationally known work focuses on Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence.
• We were proud to be part of the traditional CSE End of the Year Celebration and present the inaugural CSE Alumni Advisory Board (AAB) leadership scholarships. More than 21 master’s and undergraduate students were awarded new scholarships created by the AAB in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on our students.
• We also launched our CSE Alumni Talks series to allow students to hear and learn firsthand from our alumni. I am grateful to our first three speakers: Kylie Taitano (B.S. ’14), a senior software engineer at Intuit, Alvin Chen (B.S. ’13), a senior software engineer at Microsoft Research, and Hesler Rodriguez (B.S. ’13), a senior software engineer at Amazon. If you know of an alumnus who would be interested in speaking to the next generation of computer scientists and engineers, please drop me a line!

Though uncertainty around COVID still looms, this next academic is expected to look different. Please keep your eye on CSE social media accounts for upcoming events and opportunities to stay in touch.