Brown CS News

When Brown CS alum Matt Meyer enrolled in his first computer science course at Brown, he never imagined it would shape his approach to governance. Now the newly inaugurated Governor of Delaware, Meyer tells us about his journey from software to public service, highlighting the growing intersection of technology and leadership.

Less than a year after receiving the Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography and being named an Identity 25 Digital Pioneer, Brown CS faculty member Anna Lysyanskaya has received another high honor in the field of cryptography. 

Brown CS doctoral student Rahul Sajnani has just been honored with the Best Student Paper Award for his research (“GeoDiffuser: Geometry-Based Image Editing with Diffusion Models”) at the 2025 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV).

Joseph was recognized as a leader in his field whose significant contributions meet or exceed the criteria of existing VGTC awards by being inducted into the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Academy at the annual IEEE VR conference.

The Computing Research Association (CRA) is a coalition of more than 200 organizations with the mission of enhancing innovation by joining with industry, government, and academia to strengthen research and advance education in computing. Every year, they recognize North American students who show phenomenal research potential with their Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award, and for 2024-2025, four Brown CS students received honors: Artem Agvanian and Corinn Tiffany (Finalists) alongside Byron Butaney and Kaleb Newman (Honorable Mentions).

Brown CS PhD alum Evgenios Kornaropoulos has just received an National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, the most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty in science and engineering. He is currently an assistant professor at the Computer Science Department at George Mason University and completed his graduate studies at Brown under the mentorship of Professor Roberto Tamassia.

Last month, SIGPLAN chose the 2023 work by forthcoming Brown CS faculty member Will Crichton, doctoral student Gavin Gray (formerly at ETH Zürich), and faculty member Shriram Krishnamurthi as one of four Research Highlights papers from the 2021-2023 period.
 

Brown CS alum Heidi Erwin was recently named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Games category, which recognizes early-career professionals making significant contributions in the gaming industry. Heidi is currently a senior game designer at The New York Times and was the sole designer from her hiring in May, 2021 until August, 2024. She led the design for several games, including Connections and Strands, which now have millions of daily players. 

Last semester, Brown CS PhD alum Olya Ohrimenko (now a professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne) received the 2025 Award for Outstanding Research Contribution from the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia (CORE). CORE will co-host ACSW 2025 (Australian Computer Science Week) with the Australian Council of Deans of Information and Communications Technology (ACDICT) in early February, where Olya and other CORE winners will receive their awards formally in Brisbane and give keynote talks. 

The Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) is an annual event focused on research into new techniques for data management. Last month, CIDR 2025 presented two Test of Time awards for papers published in conference years 2003, 2025, and 2007 that had great impact over the last 20 years. One of them (“The Design of the Borealis Stream Processing Engine”) was the work of two Brown CS faculty members and six alums.