College of Engineering Announces 2015 Faculty Awards
The UC Davis College of Engineering has announced the recipients of its 2015 Faculty Awards. Four College of Engineering faculty members will be acknowledged at an event to be announced.
Matt Bishop, a professor in the Department of Computer Science, has won the Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award. Matt has been with us since 1994, and during those two decades has established himself as a renowned expert in computer security: a field whose crucial importance becomes more obvious by the day, in the wake of ever-larger hacking intrusions. Matt has long been aware of such vulnerabilities, and in 2007 led the “Red Team” that exposed glaring security flaws in electronic voting machines that had been proposed for use in California and elsewhere. His 2002 textbook, Computer Security: Art and Science, remains the field’s seminal resource manual, in great part due to his frequent revisions. He’s an enormously popular and effective instructor with both undergraduates and graduates, who — year after year — acknowledge him with top evaluations and praise for his informative lectures, and for being accessible and attentive to their needs. In a word, Matt is inspiring, and his students respond by being dedicated, attentive and passionate.
The Outstanding Senior Faculty Award is presented to Dan Gusfield, also in the Department of Computer Science. Dan has been a highly visible presence at UC Davis since arriving in 1987. He chaired the Department of Computer Science for four years, and he wrote the bioinformatics section of the genomics/bioinformatics initiative proposal that resulted in the creation of UC Davis’ Genomics Center. He also co-chaired the campus initiative on “Computational Characterization and Exploitation of Biological Networks,” which resulted in seven new faculty members hired in an equal number of different departments. He’s a distinguished author who recently published his third book, ReCombinatorics: The Algorithmics of Ancestral Recombination Graphs and Explicit Phylogenetic Networks. Putting that book’s theory into practice, Dan has been working with a UC Berkeley geneticist who hopes to use such techniques to better understand Type 2 diabetes.
Laura Marcu, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, earned the Outstanding Mid-Career Faculty Research Award. Laura joined UC Davis in January 2006, and holds a joint appointment in the UC Davis School of Medicine, as a professor of neurological surgery. She also serves as co-leader of the biotechnology program within the UC Davis Cancer Center. Her research focuses on promoting better diagnostic, treatment and prevention of human diseases through advancements in biophotonic technology, via interdisciplinary projects that enable the early diagnosis and intraoperative demarcation of tumors, the prevention of stroke and heart attack, and cancer therapy. In late 2013, she was named “Domain Leader” of the UC Davis branch of the University of California BRAID (Biomedical Research Acceleration, Integration and Development) Center for Accelerated Innovation.
Finally, the Outstanding Junior Faculty Award goes to Jane Gu, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Jane joined our College of Engineering in 2012. Her research interests include RF/MMIC/THz and mixed-signal integrated circuits and systems; imaging, radar and communication circuits and systems; and bio-sensing and bio-imaging circuits and systems. In December 2013, the National Science Foundation’s Division of Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems awarded a five-year grant of $400,000 for her project titled “Terahertz Interconnect, the Last Centimeter Data Link.” In July 2014, she was named co-PI on a three-year project, “Spectrometer on a Chip,” to be led by Brian Drouin, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. That project is being funded by a $941,000 grant from NASA.
The awards will be presented at an event to be announced at a later date.