Each year, the George R. Brown School of Engineering recognizes members of its faculty and staff for outstanding research, teaching, advising and service. Two members of Rice’s Department of Computer Science were selected as recipients.
Anastasios Kyrillidis, Outstanding Faculty Research Award
Anastasios Kyrillidis, Noah Harding Assistant Professor Computer Science, was given the Outstanding Faculty Research Award. This honor is awarded to tenured or tenure-track faculty who demonstrate excellence in both teaching and research. Recipients are noted for having most contributed to highly impactful publications or publicly available software, based on research conducted at Rice and published or developed during the last five years.
Chris Jermaine, chair of the Department of Computer Science, calls Kyrillidis a “teaching superstar,” and says, “His magnetism, enthusiasm, and command of the material in the classroom cannot be overstated. At the heart of this amazing teaching ability is his deep love for optimization as a field of study. Just as Tasos is an amazing teacher, he’s also an amazing researcher, destined for great things. His research focuses on the theory and practice of non-convex optimization, which is important because optimization powers modern machine learning.”
Michael Nute, Outstanding Postdoctoral Research Award
The School of Engineering also recognized Michael Nute, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science, with the Outstanding Postdoctoral Research Award.
This award celebrates a postdoctoral researcher currently at Rice who has significantly contributed to a research program through highly impactful publications, proposal writing, or other endeavors at Rice University.
Nute is a researcher and member of the Treangen Lab. Todd Treangen, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, says, “Dr. Nute is on a clear path to becoming a top tier tenure-track faculty member in the field of computational biology, specifically, focusing on questions at the intersection of computer science, statistics, and metagenomics. The research questions he is currently pursuing are multi-disciplinary, timely, and challenging. Dr. Nute is a thoughtful and creative scientist as well as a very supportive and nurturing mentor.”
Congratulations to both Kyrillidis and Nute on these awards! The full list of awardees is available on the School of Engineering’s website.