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.
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.
According to The Brown Daily Herald, Brown University is the top producing school of Fulbright U.S. students for the 2024-25 academic year. It's the fifth time Brown has earned the recognition in the past decade.
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.
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.
