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.
Brown CS faculty member Don Stanford has just delivered his last lecture for the department after more than two decades in the classroom. Some members of our community have known him for a half-century (he earned an MS in Computer Science, Computational and Applied Mathematics from Brown in 1977 after a BA in International Relations in 1972), and few of them will be surprised that Don’s energy and ability to engage with his audience are as strong as ever.
CAREER Awards are given in support of outstanding junior faculty teacher-scholars who excel at research, education, and integration of the two within the context of an organizational mission.
Last year, Brown announced the founding of the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination and Redesign (CNTR), whose mission is to redefine computer science education, research, and technology to center the needs, problems, and aspirations of all, especially those that technology has left behind.
Over the weekend of October 5, three Brown CS undergraduates, Noah Kim, Sean Kim, and Eric Yoon, won first place in the Healthcare Track at Yale University’s annual hackathon, dubbed YHack, with their personal project fueled by artificial intelligence.
The Paris C. Kanellakis Memorial Lecture honors a distinguished computer scientist who was an esteemed and beloved member of the Brown CS community. Paris came to Brown in 1981 and became a full professor in 1990. Last week, Virginia Vassilevska Williams of MIT delivered the twenty-fourth annual Paris C. Kanellakis Memorial Lecture: “A Fine-Grained Approach to Algorithms and Complexity”.
