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Honors & Awards

The Northwestern CS community is recognized for their accomplishments in research, teaching, mentorship, and more.

External Faculty Awards and Recognition

Our faculty is honored to receive awards and recognition from external organizations, including the Association for Computing Machinery, Computing Research Association, and the National Science Foundation.

Northwestern University Awards

CS faculty also receive interal honors from Northwestern University.

Department Awards

Northwestern CS bestows internal department awards to faculty, students, and staff for excellence and service within the department.


A sampling of recent accomplishments and honors received by faculty and students is listed below:

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2024 Awards and Accomplishments

Faculty and Staff Awards

  • Karan Ahuja earned a 2024 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Outstanding Dissertation Award, which recognizes excellent dissertation research in human-computer interaction.
  • Sara Owsley Sood was named a 2024 recipient of The Alumnae of Northwestern University’s Award for Curriculum Innovation. Sood's curricular innovation project was inspired and led by undergraduate student interest in raising awareness about the need to consider the ethical implications of technology.
  • Marcelo Worsley was named a research fellow with the Jacobs Foundation to support his work helping students learn computer science through sports.

Student and Alumni Awards

  • Nadharm Dhiantravan, Joel Goh, Marko Veljanovski, and Garrett Weil — received honorable mentions in the Computer Research Association 2023-2024 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award competition.
  • PhD students Taylor Olson and Lixu Wang have been awarded IBM PhD Fellowships in recognition of their demonstrated academic excellence and innovative research.

2023 Awards and Accomplishments

Faculty and Staff Awards

  • Brenna Argall was elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering’s (AIMBE) College of Fellows.
  • Christos Dimoulas and Xiao Wang received Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
  • Kristian Hammond was elected a 2023 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Fellow.
  • Michael Horn received a 2023 Daniel I. Linzer Award for Faculty Excellence in Diversity and Equity.
  • Samir Khuller was elevated to an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow and was also elected to the Computing Research Association (CRA) Board of Directors for a three-year term.
  • Qi Zhu received Design for Environmental Sustainablity in Computing Program (DESC) from the National Sciene Foundation. 
  • Seda Ogrenci received a Phase 2 NSF Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems award with a multi-institution team.

Joint Faculty and Student Awards

  • Emma Alexander, Sarah Van Wart, and Northwestern Computer Science student tutors are supporting efforts towards more equitable communities with the YWCA Evanston/North Shore through a Racial Equity and Community Partnership grant awarded by Northwestern’s Office of Neighborhood and Community Relations.

Student and Alumni Awards

  • PhD alum Modibo Camara, who was jointly advised by Jason Hartline and Eddie Dekel, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Economics at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, won the 2022 ACM SIGecom Doctoral Dissertation Award.
  • PhD student Melissa Chen (advised by Eleanor O'Rourke) was awarded a Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W) Computer Science Research Conference Scholarship to attend the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) Technical Symposium 2023 in March.
  • Amil Dravid was named a finalist in the national Computer Research Association (CRA) 2023 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards.
  • PhD students Lily Ge (advised by Matthew Kay) and Mara Ulloa (advised by Maia Jacobs) were awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowships.
  • The competitive programming “ispc team” - Felix Haba, Nikhil Kalghatgi, and Chi Li - won third place in the Mid-Central Regional International Collegiate Programming Contest and advances to the 2023 ICPC North America Championship. The team is coached by postdoctoral scholar Quanquan Liu and Professor Konstantin Makarychev.
  • PhD student Vaidehi Srinivas (advised by Aravindan Vijayaraghavan) received a Presidential Fellowship, the most prestigious fellowship awarded to graduate students by Northwestern University.
  • PhD student Mara Ulloa (advised by Maia Jacobs) received a Social Justice Mini-Grant through the Graduate School (TGS) Office of Diversity and Inclusion (ODI) to support her collaboration with We All Code (WAC), a volunteer-run, 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that offers free educational resources and hands-on coding classes in web, game, and app development to Chicago youth ages 7 to 17.

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2022 Awards and Accomplishments

Faculty and Staff Awards

Joint Faculty and Student Awards

  • V.S. Subrahmanian and PhD student Sayak Chakrabarty won Best Paper Award at the 20th IEEE International Conference on Dependable, Autonomic & Secure Computing for the paper “A New Dynamically Changing Attack on Review Fraud Systems and a Dynamically Changing Ensemble Defense.” The paper was co-authored by former Northwestern CS postdoc Youzhi Zhang (Hong Kong Institute of Science & Innovation, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Rui Liu (Meta), and Andrea Pugliese (Università della Calabria).
  • Team TUTELARY – Zhenpeng Lin, a third-year PhD student, Yueqi Chen, a visiting scholar with Northwestern CS, and Xinyu Xing – successfully demonstrated a use-after-free bug leading to elevation of privilege on Ubuntu Desktop at the Pwn2Own hacking contest. The team won a $40,000 prize.
  • Qi Zhu and Zhilu Wang, a fifth-year PhD student in electrical and computer engineering, won a Best Paper Award in the Embedded Systems Design track at the Association for Computing Machinery/Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Design, Automation, and Test in Europe Conference 2022.

Student and Alumni Awards

  • Carina Biar, an undergraduate student majoring in neuroscience with a minor in computer science, won a Barry Goldwater Scholarship. Biar is a peer mentor for the COMP_SCI 214: Data Structures and Algorithms course.
  • Modibo Camara (PhD ’22), who was jointly advised by Jason Hartline and Eddie Dekel, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Economics at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, won the ACM SIGecom Best Paper with a Student Lead Author and an Exemplary Theory Track Award for his paper “Computationally Tractable Choice.”
  • Jacob Kelter, a PhD candidate in the joint Computer Science and Learning Sciences Program through the School of Education and Social Policy and the McCormick School of Engineering, received a Presidential Fellowship, the most prestigious fellowship awarded to graduate students by Northwestern University.
  • Alisa Liu (’20), currently a PhD student at the University of Washington, received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
  • Ryan Louie, a sixth-year PhD student in the joint Technology and Social Behavior program with Northwestern's School of Communication, received a 2022 Google PhD Fellowship in Human Computer Interaction.
  • Students in Northwestern Engineering’s Design, Technology, and Research (DTR) program earned top awards in the Undergraduate Category at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) 2022 Student Research Competition. Fardeem Munir, a fourth-year undergraduate in computer science at the McCormick School of Engineering, and Roxanna Wilcox ('22) won first place. Cindy Hu, a fourth-year undergraduate in computer science at Northwestern Engineering and in communication studies at Northwestern’s School of Communication, won second place.
  • Ruiqi Pan ('22) was named McCormick School of Engineering’s 2022 Walter P. Murphy Cooperative Engineering Education Student of the Year. Pan plans to begin the master of computational data science program at Carnegie Mellon University in the fall.
  • MS student Archana Ramasubramaniam and her team earned third place at the MIT Energy Hackathon event, held November 11-13, 2022.
  • PhD student Nick Wanninger (advised by Peter Dinda) won the Best Artifact Award at EuroSys 2022.
  • PhD candidate Yunming Xiao earned second place in the Hewlett Packard summer intern fair for project proposing a novel SmartNIC-aided control plane called Conspirator which can mitigate the various performance bottlenecks of today’s distributed machine learning workloads.
  • Undergraduates Peter Zhong and Jay Zou received honorable mentions in the Computer Research Association 2022 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards.

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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.

Joint Faculty and Student Awards

  • Nikos Hardavellas and PhD candidate Haiyang Han received a best paper award nomination at the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED) for their paper titled "Pho$: A Case for Shared Optical Cache Hierarchies."
  • PhD student Hugo Flores García, research assistant and undergraduate Aldo Aguilar, PhD candidate Ethan Manilow, and Professor Bryan Pardo won the Best Paper Award at the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Conference.
  • Professor Xiao Wang and third-year PhD student Chenkai Weng won runner-up for Best Paper Award at the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control Conference on Computer and Communications Security.

Student and 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. 
  • Souradip Ghosh ('21) received DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. He is currently a first-year PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University.
  • PhD student Byungjin Jun (advised by Fabian Bustamante) won a Google PhD Fellowship.
  • 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."

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2020 Awards and Accomplishments

Faculty Awards

Research

Teaching and Mentoring

Joint Faculty and Student Awards

Student Awards

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