Celebrating USC Viterbi’s Excellence – USC Viterbi

At the 2024 Faculty & Staff Awards, USC Viterbi Dean Yannis C. Yortsos celebrated important anniversaries, major milestones and faculty and staff excellence. The dean noted that although the school of engineering held its first Faculty & Staff Awards in 1979,  the Wednesday, April 24, ceremony at Town Gown marked the 45^th gathering, or the Sapphire anniversary. (Covid-19 led to the cancellation of the event in 2020.)

“According to the web, the sapphire represents a couple’s deep and enduring love for each other. I translate: it means the school’s deep and enduring love for its constituents! The color is deep blue, hence my attire today,” Yortsos said. “So, welcome to the 2024 45th anniversary to celebrate the extraordinary achievements of extraordinary people.”

There was much to rejoice about.

Yortsos noted that USC Viterbi recently feted the 50th birthdays, or golden anniversaries, of the USC Information Sciences Institute, the Distance Education Network (DEN), and the Institute of Image and Signal Processing (SIPI). He added that the engineering school will celebrate later this year the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Institute of Creative Technologies, or ICT.

2024, Yortsos said, marks the 20th anniversary of the Viterbi naming. In the two decades since then, more 14,000 students have earned undergraduate degrees, 20,000 have graduated with master’s degrees and 3,000 have earned Ph.D.s. These alumni “proudly carry the Viterbi name with them wherever they are in their life and place in the world. What an incredible legacy, meaningful, inspiring, forever lasting.”

Fifteen years ago, USC Viterbi co-created the Grand Challenges Scholars Program, reimagining 21st-century engineering education. The program “fundamentally embodies the combination of two powerful attributes of USC Viterbi: outstanding technical competence and outstanding character,” he said. In a happy development, last year, the Grand Challenges Scholars Program relocated to USC.

Adopted by more than 100 universities worldwide, the GCSP received the 2022 Gordon Prize of the NAE, the first time USC Engineering has won such a national honor. And in an unprecedented feat, USC Viterbi won the 2023 Gordon Prize for a second consecutive year through Professor Azad Madni’s systems engineering innovation.

“In keeping with USC Viterbi’s commitment to changing the conversation about engineering, the undergraduate entering fall class was gender-balanced for a fifth consecutive year, an unparalleled accomplishment for an engineering school,” Yortsos said. “And since Andrew and Erna Viterbi’s generous gift, the numbers of Black undergraduate students more than doubled, and those of Hispanic undergrads more than tripled.”

The dean also highlighted some more recent USC Viterbi big wins.

In 2023, the Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science were named, bringing to five the number of named academic departments. Last year, USC Viterbi was also awarded a CHIPS ACT designation to lead one of the eight hubs established nationally. Two years before, Yortsos added, the National Science Foundation tapped the engineering school to lead the I-Corps Hub on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, one of only five such hubs initially established.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also awarded an $11.34 million grant to establish the USC ReWater Center (Water Reuse and Resource Recovery Center), which is based at the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE).  Led by Amy Childress, the center aims to consolidate research for water treatment technologies, as well as advance education about water reuse and facilitate the communication of technical and regulatory information.

In recognition of the hard work and noteworthy achievement of select faculty and staff members, Dean Yortsos and other USC Viterbi leaders presented a series of awards during the event. Awardees included:

• Kevin Giang – Staff Early Career Award
• Nadia Barosy – Staff Award for Excellence
• Lyneisha Brooks – Linda Rock Staff Service Award
• Wade Hsu – Junior Research Award
• Maral Mousavi – Junior Research Award
• Eva Kanso – Senior Research Award
• Qifa Zhou – Use-Inspired Research Award
• Nitin Kalé – Dean’s Award for Innovation in Teaching and Education
• Megan McCain – Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching
• Marco Paolieri – Viterbi Part-Time Faculty Teaching Award
• Heather Culbertson – Ershaghi Faculty Mentorship Award
• Sandeep Gupta – John O’ Brien Faculty Service Award
• Elizabeth Graddy – Special Service Award

At the end of his address, Yortsos spoke about one of USC Viterbi’s most important new initiatives in years: the just launched School of Advanced Computing, the centerpiece of the $1 billion Frontiers of Computing.

The school’s mission, the dean said, is “to solve grand challenges across the whole spectrum of natural and social phenomena, across USC. In the process, it also advances many valuable purposes, such as scientific discovery; more potent forms of advanced computing, from AI to quantum; the solution of vexing problems in sustainability, health, security, and enriching life; and the pruning and ultimate elimination of unavoidable unintended consequences, that challenge our ethics and our humanity.”

Gaurav Sukhatme, the inagurual SAC director and the Fletcher Jones Foundation Endowed Chair in Computer Science and Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering, highlighted some of the School of Advanced Computing’s exciting new initiatives.

They include a plan to recruit several senior-level tenured faculty to SAC; the development of a master’s program to teach interdisciplinary data science, including new MS degrees; and the recent launch of the first research center in the School of Advanced Computing, the USC-Capital One Center for Responsible AI and Decision Making in Finance (CREDIF). The new center, Sukhatme said, advances responsible AI for financial services through innovative research and fellowship support for doctoral students.

“These are exciting times, and our commitment to excellence and innovation in computing across all facets of USC is unwavering,” Sukhatme said.  “We’ve only just got going, so stay tuned.”

Kevin Giang – Staff Early Career Award

Nadia Barosy – Staff Award for Excellence

Lyneisha Brooks – Linda Rock Staff Award for Service 

Wade Hsu – Junior Research Award

Maral Mousavi – Junior Research Award

Qifa Zhou – Use-Inspired Research Award

Nitin Kalé – Dean’s Award for Innovation in Teaching and Education

Megan McCain – Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award

Marco Paolieri – Viterbi Part-Time Faculty Teaching Award

Heather Culbertson – Ershaghi Faculty Mentorship Award

Sandeep Gupta – John O’ Brien Faculty Service Award

 

 

Published on April 26th, 2024

Last updated on April 26th, 2024