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Alexei Kitaev, Professor of Theoretical Physics and Computer Science, has been named a MacArthur Fellow, winning one of the five-year, $500,000 grants that are awarded annually to creative, original individuals and that are often referred to as the "genius" awards. Kitaev explores the mysterious behavior of quantum systems and their implications for developing practical applications, such as quantum computers. He has made important theoretical contributions to a wide array of topics within condensed-matter physics, including quasicrystals and quantum chaos. Read more...

Professor Adam Wierman has been named a recipient of the 2008 Okawa Foundation Research Grant. This prize honors top young researchers working in the fields of information and telecommunications. The grant awardees will be honored by the Okawa Foundation on October 8 in San Francisco.

The National Science Foundation's Expeditions in Computing program has awarded $10 million to the Molecular Programming Project, a collaborative effort by researchers at Caltech and the University of Washington, led by Professor Erik Winfree, to establish a fundamental approach to the design of complex molecular and chemical systems based on the principles of computer science. Read more...

CS grad student Dave Buchfuhrer and his advisor Chris Umans were awarded the Track A Best Paper Award at the 35th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 2008), for their paper "The complexity of Boolean formula minimization." Also at ICALP, Caltech postdoc Shengyu Zhang and coauthors Sean Hallgren, Alexandra Kolla, Pranab Sen won the Track C Best Paper Award for their paper "Making classical honest verifier zero knowledge protocols secure against quantum attacks."

Fedor Manin won this year's Bhansali Prize. The prize is awarded to an undergraduate student for outstanding research in Computer Science. Fedor settled the computational complexity of the problem of "nonrepetitive graph edge coloring," in work that that began as a SURF project two summers ago.

Two of our faculty members, Professor Mani Chandy and Professor Mathieu Desbrun, were recognized as exceptional instructors for the 2007-2008 ASCIT Teaching and Staff Awards, after a selection made by the undergraduate Academics and Research Committee (ARC) and the Associated Students of the California Institute of Technology (ASCIT). Given that this award is bestowed upon only 5 faculty members each year, having two in CS is cause for celebration.

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