Brown CS News

Brown University’s Dean of the Faculty gives out five different awards annually to recognize excellence in teaching, and this year, Eliot Horowitz Assistant Professor of Computer Science Malte Schwarzkopf has received the Philip J. Bray Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Physical Sciences.  

After forty-five years at Brown, Kathy Kirman Billings, Project and Financial Manager for Brown CS Technical Staff (tstaff), is retiring. Above everything else, she describes the Department as a tight-knit community: “People care about each other and look out for each other. I’ve gotten to know so many students over the years, and I’m still friends with some of them.”

Skylar, a member of the Class of 2026, has earned one of the nation's leading undergraduate scholarships for her achievements in mathematics, engineering and the natural sciences.

Brown CS alum Layla Oesper has been honored with the 2025 Computing Research Association (CRA) Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award, which recognizes individual faculty members who have provided exceptional mentorship, undergraduate research experiences, and in parallel, guidance on admission and matriculation of these students to research-focused graduate programs in computing. Currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carleton College, Layla specializes in developing algorithms for computational biology, with a particular emphasis on cancer research.

In the space of a month, Brown CS faculty member Maurice Herlihy has been awarded honorary doctorates from two different institutions: Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), located in Haifa, Israel, and Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano, Switzerland. Technion conferred upon him the title of Doctor Honoris Causa on June 9, during its annual Board of Governors meeting, while USI presented him with the honorary doctorate on May 10, during its Dies Academicus ceremony.

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).