Congratulations Faculty Award Winners: Aaron Sidford, Melissa Valentine, Johan Ugander
Congratulations to Melissa Valentine and Aaron Sidford for winning NSF CAREER awards, and to Johan Ugander for winning a Young Investigator Award from the Army Research Office!
Assistant Professor Melissa Valentine was awarded the 2019 NSF CAREER Award for her research: Computational work design: How algorithms and crowdsourcing are changing organizational design. Professor Valentine proposed three field studies of companies that have advanced adoption of algorithms or crowdsourcing, to see how those technologies are changing the way that work is organized. She has created new undergraduate and online classes, in addition to conducting workshops with policymakers about how policy needs to change given these technologies.
Assistant Professor Aaron Sidford was awarded the 2019 NSF CAREER Award for his research: Theory of Fast Graph Optimization. His research will focus on providing provably faster algorithms for solving a range of fundamental, canonical, and pervasive graph-optimization problems, including the maximum-flow problem, Perron vector computation, and solving Markov decision processes. Read more here.
The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.
Assistant Professor Johan Ugander was awarded the Young Investigator Award from the Army Research Office (ARO). He received the award for his project titled, "Network Science for Choices and Rankings". Professor Ugander's research develops algorithmic and statistical frameworks for analyzing social networks, social systems, and other large-scale data-rich contexts, which have formed a critical infrastructure of our modern networked world, and found widely varying applications in Army and organizations.
The Army Research Office considers its Young Investigator Program award to be “one of the most prestigious awards bestowed by the Army on outstanding scientists beginning their independent careers”, the objective of which is to attract outstanding young university faculty members to pursue fundamental research in areas relevant to the Army, to support their research in these areas, and to encourage their teaching and research careers.
