School of Engineering faculty receive awards in summer 2024 | MIT News

Faculty and researchers receive many external awards throughout the year. The MIT School of Engineering periodically highlights the honors, prizes, and medals won by community members working in academic departments, labs, and centers. Summer 2024 honorees include the following:

Polina Anikeeva, the Matoula S. Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was recognized as a finalist for the Blavatnik National Awards in the category of physical sciences and engineering. The Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists is the largest unrestricted scientific prize offered to America’s most promising, faculty-level scientific researchers under the age of 42.

Gabriele Farina, the X-Window Consortium Career Development Professor and assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), received an honorable mention for the 2023 Doctoral Dissertation Award. The award is presented annually to the author(s) of the best doctoral dissertation(s) in computer science and engineering.

James Fujimoto, the Elihu Thomson Professor in Electrical Engineering, won the 2024 Honda Prize for his research group’s development of optical coherence tomography. The Honda Prize is an international award that acknowledges the efforts of an individual or a group to contribute new ideas that may lead the next generation in the field of ecotechnology.

Jeehwan Kim, an associate professor in MIT’s departments of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering, won the engineering and technology category for the 2024 Falling Walls Global Call for his innovations in semiconductor technology. The Falling Walls Global Call is an international competition that seeks the most recent and innovative science breakthroughs, bringing together science enthusiasts from diverse backgrounds.

Samuel Madden, the College of Computing Distinguished Professor of Computing and faculty head of computer science in the Department of EECS, received the Edgar F Codd Innovations Award. The award is given for innovative and highly significant contributions of enduring value to the development, understanding, or use of database systems and databases.

Jelena Notaros, an assistant professor in the Department of EECS, received the 2024 Optica CLEO Highlighted Talk Award as co-principal investigator. The Optica CLEO Awards Program celebrates the field’s technical, research, education, business, leadership, and service accomplishments.

Carlos Portela, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, received the Army Early Career Program Award. The award is among the most prestigious honors granted by the U.S. Army Research Office to outstanding early-career scientists.

Yogesh Surendranath, the Donner Professor of Science in the departments of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry, was recognized as a finalist for the Blavatnik National Awards in the category of chemical sciences. The Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists is the largest unrestricted scientific prize offered to the United States’ most promising, faculty-level scientific researchers under the age of 42.

Ashia Wilson, an assistant professor in the Department of EECS, received the Best Paper Award at the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT). ACM FAccT is an interdisciplinary conference dedicated to bringing together a diverse community of scholars from computer science, law, social sciences, and humanities to investigate and tackle issues in this emerging area.