Awards and Honors

Faculty in the Department of Computer Science continue to be recognized by their peers, professional societies, and the Commonwealth of Virginia for outstanding achievements in research, teaching, and service. With the exception of lifetime achievements, awards for the most recent five years are listed and updated annually at the end of the academic year.

Lifetime Achievement Award

Lifetime achievement awards represent the highest level of professional recognition, honoring faculty whose sustained contributions have significantly advanced their field through decades of research, scholarship, and service.

  • Amarda Shehu — Outstanding Faculty Award, State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), 2022

Fellowships

Fellowships are among the most prestigious professional honors in academia, conferred by national and international societies to recognize exceptional technical innovation, leadership, and sustained impact in a discipline.

  • Daniel Menascé — IEEE Life Fellow, 2025
  • Songqing Chen — IEEE Fellow for contributions to Internet streaming, content delivery, and security, 2024
  • Jana Kosecka — IEEE Fellow for contributions to robust embodied vision systems and semantic modeling in robotics, 2023
  • Amarda Shehu — Fellow, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), 2022

Virginia Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (VASEM)

Election to the VASEM recognizes outstanding individuals who have made exceptional contributions to their disciplines and to the Commonwealth through research, education, and leadership.

National Science Foundation (NSF) Awards

NSF awards represent some of the most competitive and respected forms of federal recognition for research excellence, supporting early-career faculty and advancing innovative projects in computing, engineering, and data science.

CAREER Award

The NSF CAREER Award is the foundation’s most prestigious recognition for early-career faculty, honoring those who exemplify the role of teacher-scholar through outstanding research, education, and integration of the two.

  • Antonios Anastasopoulos — “Leveraging Grammar Books to Develop Language Technologies for Data-Scarce Languages,” 2025
  • Evgenios Kornaropoulos — “Encrypted Systems with Fine-Grained Leakage,” 2025
  • Wing Lam — “Enhanced Reliability and Efficiency of Software Regression Testing in the Presence of Flaky Tests,” 2024
  • Thema Monroe-White – "Investigating Undergraduate Student Persistence Intentions for a Diverse Data Science Community," 2024
  • ThanhVu Nguyen — “NeuralSAT: A Constraint-Solving Framework for Verifying Deep Neural Networks,” 2023
  • Jinwei Ye — “Towards Polarimetric Visual Understanding,” 2023
  • Foteini Baldimtsi — “Privacy-Preserving Transactions with Accountability Extensions,” 2022
  • Qiang Zeng — “Towards Secure and Usable IoT Authentication Under Constraints,” 2022
  • Parth Pathak – "Unifying Millimeter-wave Networking and Sensing using Commodity Backscatter," 2021
  • Dov Gordon – "Trading Security for Efficiency in Secure Computation," 2020
  • Lap-Fai (Craig) Yu – "Performance-Guided Synthesis of Virtual Environments for Personalized Training," 2020

Early Career and CRII Award

These awards recognize outstanding early-stage researchers whose work demonstrates significant promise in advancing computing and information science.

Dissertation Award

Dissertation awards honor exceptional doctoral research that demonstrates innovation, scholarly rigor, and potential to shape future directions in computer science and related fields.

  • Keren Zhou — Doctoral Dissertation Award, Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (ACM SIGHPC), 2023
  • Evgenios Kornaropoulos — Miretta Flytzani-Stephanopoulos Doctoral Thesis Achievement Award, Circle of Hellenic Academics in Boston, 2022
  • Wing Lam — Outstanding Dissertation Award, Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (ACM SIGSOFT), 2022
  • Lishan Yan — Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award, Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), 2022

Research and Publication Honors

Research and publication honors recognize the enduring influence of scholarly work, including papers that have shaped research trajectories, inspired future studies, or advanced applied computing practice.

Influential and Impact Papers

These recognitions highlight research publications that have had lasting impact on the computing community, as evidenced by citations, adoption, and continued relevance to emerging challenges.

  • ThanhVu Nguyen — Recognized by IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (50th Anniversary), 2025
  • Andrian Marcus — Recognized by the International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC), 2023
  • Andrian Marcus — Recognized by the Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE), 2020

Industrial and Research Partnership Awards

These awards celebrate faculty whose collaborations with industry partners have resulted in meaningful technological innovation, applied research breakthroughs, and real-world impact.

George Mason Awards

George Mason University honors faculty excellence across teaching, research, mentorship, and university service. These internal awards reflect the university’s commitment to innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and academic distinction.

Presidential and University-Wide Awards

Presidential awards recognize outstanding faculty whose leadership and scholarship embody the university’s mission and values, advancing both student success and institutional excellence.

  • Antonios Anastasopoulos — Presidential Faculty Excellence Award, 2024
  • Amarda Shehu — Presidential Faculty Excellence Award, 2021
  • Amarda Shehu — Beck Family Presidential Medal for Faculty Excellence in Research and Scholarship, 2021

Teaching and Mentorship Awards

Teaching and mentorship awards celebrate faculty who demonstrate exceptional dedication to pedagogy, student engagement, and the cultivation of future scholars and professionals.