October 2026
Jignesh Patel Tapped To Lead CMU Miami as Founding Dean, Vice President
Carnegie Mellon University has named an innovative educator, trailblazing researcher and savvy entrepreneur to help lead its new campus.
Jignesh Patel will serve as the founding dean and vice president of CMU Miami, a new campus announced on Sept. 30 by CMU President Farnam Jahanian and made possible thanks to a transformative philanthropic investment by Citadel founder and CEO and Griffin Catalyst founder Ken Griffin.
“CMU Miami represents a bold new chapter for Carnegie Mellon — one grounded in our strengths, animated by our mission and designed to meet the urgency of this moment for higher education, research and innovation. Jignesh Patel is exactly the right leader to help bring this vision to life,” said Jahanian. “He is a distinguished scholar, an exceptional educator and an entrepreneur who understands how to move ideas from discovery to impact. From the earliest stages of this effort, Jignesh has helped shape CMU Miami’s academic mission, research priorities and grand challenge model with clarity, energy and deep institutional commitment. His leadership will be essential as we build a campus that reflects the very best of Carnegie Mellon: rigorous, interdisciplinary, entrepreneurial and focused on solving problems that matter.”
Patel, a distinguished computer scientist, will shape the campus’ work, leading efforts to recruit top faculty and students, building partnerships across private and public sectors, and working to establish CMU Miami as a distinctive hub where bold ideas can move quickly from lab to widespread adoption.
“Dr. Patel is a distinguished scholar and successful entrepreneur who knows how to turn ideas into impact,” said Griffin. “His leadership will accelerate CMU Miami's rise as a magnet for world-class talent and a powerful engine of discovery for our city and our nation.” A faculty member in CMU’s Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science, Patel has served as interim head of its Computer Science Department since 2025. He joined CMU in 2023 following appointments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Michigan.
Extended article here.
-- CMU News, October 20, 2026, Aaron Aupperlee
October 2026
Phil Gibbons Appointed as Interim Head of the Computer Science Department
Congratulations to Phil Gibbons on his appointment as the interim head of Carnegie Mellon's Computer Science Department as the position becomes vacant with the departure of Jignesh Patel for his new role in Miami. Phil has been with CMU since 2001, and full-time faculty in CSD and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department since 2015, teaching CS courses at all levels and leading large-scale research projects. Before joining CMU, Phil worked at Intel Labs in Pittsburgh as the head of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Cloud Computing.
October 2026
Justine Sherry Receives 2026 SIGCOMM Rising Star Award!
Congratulations to Justine Sherry, PDL faculty and A. Nico Habermann Associate Professor of ECE at Carnegie Mellon University on receiveing the 2026 ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star Award. The award recognizes Justine's outstanding research contributions, early in her career, to network functions, server architectures, and Internet congestion control. Her work pairs new networking abstractions with built systems and careful evaluation. The award also celebrates her mentorship and service to the networking community.
-- ACM SIGCOMM
September 2026
Steven Dong Wins First Place in ACM SIGCOMM Student Research Competition
PDL student Steven Dong earned first place in the ACM SIGCOMM Student Research Competition (SRC) at the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM) conference in August 2026. Steven, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering, is advised by Vyas Sekar, the Tan Family Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His winning research, titled “DeePCAP: Enabling High-Fidelity and Cost-Efficient Archival Packet Trace Storage,” addresses the challenges of storing network packet traces at scale while preserving their usefulness for future analysis.
“I’m deeply honored to receive this recognition from ACM SIGCOMM and to have the opportunity to share this work with the broader networking research community,” says Steven. “This award is especially meaningful because it recognizes the potential of DeePCAP to address a practical challenge that has limited our ability to preserve and learn from network data over the long term.”
-- ECE News, Sept 2, 2026, Krista Burns
September 2026
PDL Researchers Awarded Best Paper Honorable Mention at VLDB '26
Congratulations to Ziyue Qiu and her co-authors Qinghan Chen (PDL alum), Muhammad Haekal Muhyidin Al-Araby, Zhuofan Chen (PDL alum), Rashmi Vinayak, and Juncheng Yang (PDL alum) on receiving Best Paper Honorable Mention at VLDB '26 in Boston for their paper "Demystifying and Improving Lazy Promotion in Cache Eviction." The work uses production traces from real-world systems to benchmark five Lazy Promotion strategies: Probabilistic-LRU, Batch-LRU, Delay-LRU, FIFO-reinsertion, and Random-LRU. It then evaluates these techniques across miss ratio, scalability, promotion count, and a novel metric called promotion efficiency, which measures the number of hits per promotion.
July 2026
Phillip Gibbons Receives the SPAA Parallel Computing Award!
The SPAA Parallel Computing Award recognizes a person either for a singular important result or for a career of accomplishments related to the SPAA community. We congratulate Phillip B. Gibbons on the receipt of this award "for a body of groundbreaking work that bridges the theory and practice of parallel algorithms, including work on asynchrony, memory consistency, contention, synopsis data structures, scheduling, and cache efficiency.” HIs student, Yiwei Zhao, says "this is a wonderful recognition of his foundational contributions and his long-standing impact on the community".
-- with info from SPAA and LinkedIn
May 2026
PDL Group Wins Eurosys '26 Test of Time Award!
Congratulations to Henggang Cui, Hao Zhang, Gregory R. Ganger, Phillip B. Gibbons, and Eric P. Xing as their paper "GeePS: Scalable Deep Learning on Distributed GPUs with a GPU-Specialized Parameter Server" receives the Eurosys 2026 Test of Time Award! The EuroSys Test-of-Time award is an annual prize awarded to a EuroSys paper, from those published at least 10 years earlier, that has been considered by the EuroSys Steering Committee and Officers as the one having most lasting and current impact. In their paper, Henggang and his coauthors discussed clustering GPUs as parameter servers to train large models, methods which have become indispensable to training todays massive AI projects.
April 2026
Akshitha Sriraman Named 2026 Anita Borg Early Career Award Recipient
Congratulations to Akshitha who has been awarded the Anita Borg Early Career Award by the Computer Research Association! Akshitha is a PDL faculty member and is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at CMU. Her research bridges computer architecture and systems software to enable efficient, sustainable, and impartial hyperscale data center systems. In part she is being honored for the real world impact her research has had. Her hardware designs have impacted the architecture of Intel's Alder Lake CPU, and her systems research efforts have been deployed in hyperscale data centers, reducing global environmental impact.
The CRA Anita Borg Early Career Award honors Anita Borg, a pioneering computer scientist and advocate for improving the participation and experience of women in computing. Presented annually, the award recognizes an individual in the early stages of their research career — across academia, industry, or government — who demonstrates the potential for impactful contributions and leadership in computing research, along with a strong commitment to improving access, opportunities, and experiences for all in the field.
-- with info from
Computing Research Association News
January 2026
Mohammad Bakhshalipour Wins 3rd Award for PhD Dissertation
To date, PDL Alum, Mohammad Bakhshalipour has received three awards for his PhD Dissertation on Bridging Real-Time Robotics and Computer Architecture. He was advised by Phillip Gibbons. The dissertation discusses the pivotal role robotics will play in shaping future societal frameworks, addressing the pronounced gap between the fields of robotics and computer architecture research. Firstly, the thesis introduces extensive benchmark suites for robotics tasks and applications, meticulously developed from scratch to address the critical need for performance-focused, comprehensive benchmarking environments in systems and hardware research, and secondly, it proposes efficient computer architectures tailored for robotics, focusing on the development of application-specific hardware accelerators and domain-specific processors.
Most recently, Mohammad's research was awarded the 2025 SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award (to be awarded in May 2026). Prior to that he received the ACM SIGMICRO Dissertation Award (2025), and the Carnegie Mellon University A.G. Milnes Award (2024), an award given by the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department to "dissertations of the highest quality".
October 2025
Juncheng Yang Receives DMR Thesis Award!
Congratulations to PDL Alum Juncheng Yang (advised by Rashmi Vinayak) on receiving the SIGOPS 2025 DMR Thesis Award for his dissertation on Designing Efficient and Scalable Key-value Cache Management Systems. The award, officially the ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award, is an annual award that recognizes outstanding doctoral research in software systems. Created by the ACsM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS), it was established to honor the legacy of Dennis Ritchie, a key figure in computer science, and to encourage creativity in the field. Each year, the award is given to a recent Ph.D. graduate whose dissertation demonstrates exceptional innovation and impact on software systems. Juncheng is now an assistant professor of the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
-- info from ACM SIGOPS
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