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. 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.

Baumgarten rose to corporate vice president at Raytheon and served as president of Raytheon International, integrating business activities across 76 countries. From 2009 to 2017, she served as executive-in-residence for technology and leadership at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Now retired, Baumgarten focuses her efforts on supporting environmental sustainability and expanding access to the arts and to education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Baumgarten has been engaged with the Women in Engineering program at UCLA since its inception in 2017. She has regularly served as a speaker and mentor, including at the flagship WE@UCLA Leadership Academy.

Across UCLA, Baumgarten serves on the board of advisors for the Division of Physical Sciences and Women & Philanthropy, as well as the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department Chair’s Council.

The performing arts remain an important part of Baumgarten’s life. She is immediate past president of Center Dance Arts at The Music Center in Los Angeles, where she continues to serve as a board member. She is also on the board of the Delirium Musicum Chamber Orchestra and previously served on the Everybody Dance LA board.

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.

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.