Professional Achievement in Academia Award
David Zhigang Pan
M.S. ’94, M.S. ’98, Ph.D. ’00
David Pan is a UCLA alum and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He has made transformative contributions to electronic design automation, including AI-driven methods, physical design and design for manufacturing.
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He led the development of DREAMPlace, an open-source AI-accelerated tool used in industry to design advanced graphics and AI processors, expediting chip placement by as much as 40 times. He also developed MAGICAL, an open-source system that uses AI-assisted methods to automate analog integrated-circuit layout.
With 10 U.S. patents, Pan has authored more than 550 technical papers and received more than 20 best paper awards from electronic design automation and AI conferences. He is an editor of top publications in the field, a startup co-founder and an advisor to Google X, DeepMind and other organizations. He has also served on national and international technology review and advisory boards, professional societies and conference committees.
Pan is a recipient of the Semiconductor Research Corporation Technical Excellence Award, an Nvidia Research Faculty Fellow and a Design Automation Conference Top 10 Author. He is also a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. In 2009, UCLA Samueli recognized his early-career achievements with its Rising Professional Achievement Award.
He holds the Silicon Laboratories Endowed Chair in Electrical Engineering at UT Austin and has advised more than 60 doctoral students and postdocs, many of whom now hold academic appointments and industry leadership positions worldwide.
Pan holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Peking University in China and three advanced degrees from UCLA — a master’s in atmospheric sciences and a master’s and doctorate in computer science.
Professional Achievement in Industry
Adam Cheyer
M.S. ’93
AI pioneer and entrepreneur Adam Cheyer has helped launch five companies and developed technologies that have become part of widely used consumer products and services.
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As chief architect of SRI International’s Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes project, Cheyer helped develop an AI system designed to reason, learn from experience and adapt to users’ needs. He later co-founded Siri, where he managed technology development as vice president of engineering. After Apple acquired Siri in 2010, Cheyer joined the iPhone engineering group and led AI and server-side engineering for the voice assistant.
He co-founded Viv Labs, an intelligent-interface company that was acquired by Samsung, where he served as vice president of engineering and U.S. developer relations for Bixby, Samsung’s voice assistant. He also co-founded Sentient Technologies, a large-scale machine-learning platform company acquired by Cognizant. He was co-founder and CEO of GamePlanner.ai, which was later acquired by Airbnb, where he served as vice president of AI Experience. Cheyer was also a founding member of Change.org, the world’s largest petition platform, with more than 500 million members.
Cheyer has authored 60 publications and holds 50 patents. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Project Voice, won a Crunchies Award for Best Technology Achievement and received the 2024 Alumni Achievement Award from UCLA Samueli, where he previously served as a distinguished speaker at commencement. He received his bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University in Massachusetts.
Outside of his professional career, Cheyer is also an accomplished, award-winning magician who often incorporates magic into his technology talks. He is a member of the Magic Castle in Los Angeles and the International Brotherhood of Magicians, and has performed for millions, including on the television show “Penn & Teller: Fool Us.”
Rising Professional Achievement Award
Di Wu
M.S. ’15, Ph.D.’17
Since earning his doctorate from UCLA Samueli, Di Wu has built a career turning advances in computing and artificial intelligence research into technologies used in fields ranging from genomics to generative AI.
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Wu received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University in China before coming to UCLA for graduate study. He joined the VAST Lab, led by Jason Cong, a distinguished professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering and holder of the Volegenau Chair for Engineering Excellence. For his doctoral research, Wu helped prototype large-scale field-programmable gate array (FPGA) acceleration for big-data analytics, machine learning and genomics.
After UCLA, Wu became a staff engineer, and later, a founding engineer and software director at Falcon Computing Solutions, a VAST Lab spinoff. He helped produce FPGA-accelerated genomics pipelines supporting precision medicine and cancer research, including work supporting research conducted at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.
He later co-founded and served as CEO of OmniML, which translated advanced model-compression research into technology for deploying AI on edge devices. The company designed tools to make AI models faster and more energy-efficient while simplifying deployment across different hardware platforms. Less than two years after its founding, OmniML was acquired in 2023 by Nvidia, where Wu now serves as director of Deep Learning Algorithm and Software.
Wu has also mentored aspiring entrepreneurs, sharing lessons from his experience building companies, scaling technologies, setting priorities and navigating the challenges of bringing new products to market.
Alumni Service Award
Susan Baumgarten
’73, M.S. ’76, MBA ’79
Susan Baumgarten was a teenage ballerina before becoming a student at UCLA, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and mathematics, a master’s in electrical engineering and an MBA.
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She went on to launch a career spanning electrical and systems engineering, business development and executive leadership at Hughes Aircraft, whose defense operations were acquired by aerospace and defense electronics firm Raytheon in 1997.
She went on to launch a career spanning electrical and systems engineering, business development and executive leadership at Hughes Aircraft, whose defense operations were acquired by aerospace and defense electronics firm Raytheon in 1997.Before his graduate studies, Lu received his bachelor’s in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University and taught electronics in the Taiwan Army Missile Corps for two years as an Officer of Honor. At UCLA, he was advised by Henry Samueli, a professor who later became his boss at Broadcom. He authored more than 20 papers and received the 1991-1992 Predoctoral Fellowship Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Solid-State Circuits Council.
After UCLA, Lu became one of the first two full-time employees of Broadcom Corporation co-founded by Samueli. Now known as Broadcom Inc., the startup evolved into a global leader in semiconductor and software development. As technical director, Lu has been instrumental to the company’s major scientific achievements. In 1998, he led the team that developed the world’s first single-chip, cable-modem headend receiver, a device that processes TV and internet signals for distribution to subscribers. He also oversaw the development of six generations of cable-modem headend transceiver integrated circuits, now used in most U.S. residential broadband systems.
Lu has been a member of IEEE since 1993 and served on the Technical Program Committee of IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference from 1994 to 1999. He is the inventor or co-inventor of more than 45 issued and pending patents.
Over the years, Lu has continued to support UCLA Samueli, establishing two graduate student fellowships and an optics and quantum electronics research laboratory. He has also endowed a faculty chair and given a gift of $1 million to set up research funds in the Bioengineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering departments.
Eon Instrumentation, Inc. Excellence in Teaching Award
Lara Dolecek
Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering, UCLA Samueli
Lara Dolecek is a professor of electrical and computer engineering. She joined UCLA Samueli in 2009 and has taught thousands of students in undergraduate and graduate courses, including large-enrollment classes and specialized courses for Ph.D. students.
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She has led schoolwide efforts to introduce and develop key courses in data science, machine learning and robust data storage systems. Many undergraduate students credit her courses with building their confidence in the field, while graduate students say her ability to connect theory with contemporary practice has had a lasting impact on their careers.
Dolecek has also participated in UCLA teaching programs and the National Effective Teaching Institute, through which she developed a framework for effective teaching centered on organization, varied content and flexibility.
For the past three years, Dolecek has served as director of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department’s Fast Track to Success Program for highly motivated undergraduates. She is also an instructor with UCLA COSMOS — a pre-college academic summer program for California high school students interested in STEM — and a volunteer with various K-12 educational initiatives across Los Angeles.
Dolecek, who also holds a faculty appointment in the Mathematics Department, focuses her research on exploring mathematical foundations of robust information systems. Her many honors include research awards from the National Science Foundation, IBM, Intel and the Okawa Foundation. She previously received UCLA Samueli’s Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award as an assistant professor.
She received her B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science and an M.A. in statistics from UC Berkeley.
Robin B. Joshi Excellence in Teaching Award
Sanjay Mohanty
Associate Professor
Civil and Environmental, UCLA Samueli
Sanjay Mohanty is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. He joined UCLA Samueli in 2016 and teaches undergraduate courses on environmental engineering, green infrastructure and sustainable waste management.
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He has redesigned these courses to focus on interdisciplinary and societally relevant challenges in environmental engineering and sustainability, with frequent field trips and hands-on activities that allow students to assess pollutant exposure in communities. His classes are in high demand, attracting more than 300 students from more than 20 departments across UCLA each year.
Mohanty has also participated in training programs to refine his instructional style and course planning. He has mentored more than 60 undergraduate students in research and professional development, with nearly 40 of them publishing as co-authors on peer-reviewed publications. Seven of his undergraduate students also received highly competitive National Science Foundation research fellowships.
He examines how extreme weather events, such as wildfires and flooding, affect the transport of pollutants. His research group designs climate-resilient green infrastructure to increase water availability and reduce exposure to pollutants. Following the Palisades and Eaton fires in January 2025, his students have been testing soil samples for toxic substances.
Mohanty’s honors include a Distinguished Service Award from the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors and UCLA Samueli’s Excellence in Graduate Mentoring Award.
He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from Utkal University in India, an M.S. in environmental engineering from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a Ph.D. in environmental engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder.
Boeing Excellence in Teaching Award
Daniel Schwalbe-Koda
Assistant Professor
Materials Science and Engineering, UCLA Samueli
Daniel Schwalbe-Koda is an assistant professor of materials science and engineering. He joined UCLA Samueli in 2024 and teaches undergraduate courses in general materials science and physics of materials, and a graduate class in machine learning for predictive materials science. His research group develops computational models for materials synthesis and autonomous characterization.
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As a teacher, Schwalbe-Koda takes an “intuition-first” approach, incorporating experimental demonstrations, interactive visualizations, simulations or case studies into his lectures — including an online game he programmed as a review of electrostatics.
He has consistently received top scores in student evaluations, including the highest rating from every respondent in his graduate course. Several students shared that they incorporated the machine learning concepts he taught into their thesis research.
Schwalbe-Koda routinely updates his courses to reflect developments in rapidly evolving fields, often incorporating relevant research published just days before a lecture. He devotes time to improving his teaching and sharing best practices with colleagues across UCLA Samueli. With support from a UCLA Teaching and Learning Center grant, Schwalbe-Koda has also been exploring new ways to teach artificial intelligence to non-computer science students.
His honors include a Department of Energy Early Career Award, recognition on the 2023 Forbes 30 Under 30 Science list, a fellowship from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a merit award from the Brazilian Ministry of Defense.
Schwalbe-Koda received his bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering and master’s degree in physics from the Aeronautics Institute of Technology in Brazil, and a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
