UCLA Samueli Announces 2026 Professional Achievement Awards
Each year, the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering honors alumni, faculty, students and other engineering leaders for outstanding achievements in their fields. The following profiles highlight recipients of the Professional Achievement in Academia and Professional Achievement in Industry awards.
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. 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.
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.”