2022 CS Department Awards and Thank-Yous

We presented this year’s CS Department Awards, Golden Brick Awards (for CS staff), and the SACM COW Award in person this year! Congratulations to all recipients!

This is the seventh year of the Golden Brick Awards recognizing service to the CS Department. Congratulations to the winners!

The Golden Brick Award Recipients

Angela Thorp is kind, caring, and a great listener when I am confused or struggling inside and outside of computer science. Because of her, I have loved the CS Department and found that they truly care about their students and work hard to make sure their students know they are supported.

Ashwin Maran is an excellent head TA for CS 577 this semester. Never in my entire life have I met a better TA. He is single handedly carrying my understanding of algorithms, and I have no clue where I would be without him.

Bilge Mutlu: I would like to nominate Bilge Mutlu for his work on the building committee. It was a huge amount of effort to serve as the liaison between the department, the university entities that are involved, and the building architects.

Bolo (Josef Burger) puts in an amazing amount of effort to keep the coffee flowing. And he does a great job. He’s arranged for good coffee (which also means good water, working machines, . . . ) and does what it takes to keep things going.

Carla Rose is a dedicated passionate student leader who has given tremendous personal time to start and expand the newer student group ColorStack. She is a strong, effective voice for this student group and successfully secured resources, promoted events, and established the group as a community space within the field of Computer Sciences.

Cindy Fendrick has done an exceptional job as Academic Services Manager in the past year. She leads by example and with kindness, compassion, and humor. She is very dedicated to students and makes time to interact with them and get to know them.

David Merrell organized several SACM events, weekly TGIFs, and department board game nights.

Emma Brostrom: Out of every TA or peer mentor in CS 320, Emma Brostrom is by far the most helpful. She is really kind and patient when you have an issue and doesn’t make you feel like an idiot for not knowing something.

Gigi Mitchell keeps the department afloat. Gigi brings so much joy to the department. Even when she’s super busy, which is often, she is always ready to help everyone who comes to her office.

Indu Kilaru is working in CDIS where the departments of Computer, Data and Information Sciences come together to foster interdisciplinary research. She, alongside with CDIS, conducted career fairs and tech chats frequently across the year, which several CS and other department students attend.

Janna Boehm is a ray of sunshine in the student services dept! She makes everyone smile and laugh! And she adores her students – it shows! She even made them goodie bag treats!

Jeremy McMahan  is the head TA of joint CS 540 instruction team. Jeremy did a fantastic job in keeping the team together as an efficient teaching machine. We as instructors are very thankful of having him as the head TA.

Jill Nagler: I nominated Jill for excellence in support of our grant applications and administration

Jing Liu: For being in the core organizing team and being a very helpful and cheerful member of the systems reading group, the CS Research Sposium, WACM, and the virtual welcome weekend.

Kristin Brown has been an amazing supervisor for WES-CS! She puts so much time and effort into making sure the peer leaders feel ready to lead their sections. She truly cares about everyone involved, and we always feel so supported by her.

Kristin Eschenfelder: I’d like to nominate Kristin Eschenfelder for all of her work on our behalf of the CS Department, especially during hiring season when she met with all our candidates.

Lance Potter: Lance’s willingness to help anyone or aid in any situation is amazing! Being the largest dept on campus, he somehow manages to make any issue manageable and ‘solveable.’ And he’s always in a good mood!

Madeline Juillard graciously welcomes students into conversation and works to address their questions. She has calmed very anxious students and helped support students in accessing resources. Madeline brings this student-centered approach to her daily conversations with students.

Mark Mansi is a uniquely helpful contributor to the CS Department community. He gives generously of his time and talent to organize activities for grad students. Mark frequently shares useful information via gradchat.

Matt Sinclair has consistently gone above and beyond for the students of 552 this semester: Making sure we learn the content thoroughly by taking interest in it, which has made me fall in love with computer architecture; Holding extra office hours whenever required including night and weekends. I consider him my favourite professor and 552 my favourite class.

Mehmet Demirel is a person who always offers to help when needed and has given support to SACM as well as to graduate staff members unfailingly when needed. He serves the department, mostly behind the scenes, with humility and a spirit of generosity!

Michael Swift continually shows dedication to students’ experiences by listening to feedback and creating an inclusive and engaging learning environment. He also promotes events and opportunities within the CS department to ensure students are up to date about activities in CS.

Michael Verban was a peer mentor for the CS537 class. I truly believe that without him, many students would not have done as well as they did, including myself.

Mina Kim: For being the driving force of WACM mentoring program, tireless work, and zeal. It is amazing that Mina seemed never to get frustrated about those issues, and always brings things up again and leads things more than graduate students within the mentoring chairs.

Sacha Jungerman: For conceiving and organizing the Computer Vision Roundtable (CVRT), a biweekly event for discussing recent computer vision research. Prior to Sacha’s efforts, the department didn’t have any reading groups or similar forums for computer vision.

Shivaram Venkataraman offered the 839: Advanced ML Systems course. I thoroughly enjoyed every part of the course. The energetic atmosphere in class and the stream of thoughts and ideas discussed in class has been one of the best experiences in graduate school.

The Undergraduate Projects Lab has done a lot to support their peers, including hosting a Course Preview Night. They went through summer and fall course offerings and gave excellent advice on course pairings, difficulty, and tips from students. They also were available to answer specific student questions.

Tom Erickson: I’d like to nominate Tom for his wonderful leadership of CDIS through a time of change and growth and for his tireless and amazing work promoting CDIS and fundraising for the new CS building.

Tyler Caraza Harter used TA and peer mentor feedback (in F21) along with his own intuition to re-designed the course quite substantially in S22. The improvements in the course were immediately evident in terms of student engagement in labs, projects, and student intuition during office hours.

Yuvraj Patel Yuvraj has been the best instructor I’ve ever had in all my time taking CS classes at the UW. BY FAR my most favourite professors in this school. He is an absolute asset to UW-Madison!