Patrice Koehl and Yong Jae Lee Win College of Engineering Outstanding Faculty Awards

Two computer science faculty members were honored by the UC Davis College of Engineering for their outstanding work in the 2018-19 academic year. Professor Patrice Koehl received the Outstanding Late Mid-Career Faculty Research Award and Assistant Professor Yong Jae Lee received the Outstanding Junior Faculty Research Award. These awards are the college’s highest honors given to faculty.

They will be recognized, along with all of their colleagues who received awards in the last year, at the Celebration of Faculty Excellence awards ceremony and reception on October 10 from 5 – 6:30 p.m. in the Shields Library Courtyard.

Late Mid-Career Faculty Research Award: Patrice Koehl

Computer science professor Patrice Koehl came to UC Davis in 2004. In his role as a science instructor, Koehl advises students as they strive to transform their dreams into goals, while guiding them along the paths that will help them reach these goals. Koehl has clearly demonstrated excellence in research by the high achievement in both the quality and significance of his research record. His research interests involve using mathematics, physics and biology to develop new computational approaches to analyze data. His research is driven by the need to integrate this information into models of biological activity and interaction in order to control, manipulate and create biological systems. He has published 139 papers so far, some of which he is the sole author. He has established several collaborations both on campus with research groups in mathematics and computer science, as well as with researchers in other parts of the U.S., in Asia and in Europe. He is also the founding director of the Data Science Initiative at UC Davis whose mission is to promote, facilitate and accelerate data-enabled research leading to qualitatively new insights within and across disciplines.

Junior Faculty Research Award: Yong Jae Lee

Yong Jae Lee has been an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at UC Davis since July 2014. Lee’s research interests are in computer vision, machine learning and computer graphics. He is particularly interested in creating robust visual recognition systems that can understand visual data with minimal human supervision. He also applies his vision and learning algorithms to computer graphics and social network analysis applications. Since joining computer science, Lee has published multiple journals and book chapters. Lee has received two prestigious early-career awards, the Army Research Office Young Investigator Award in 2017 and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2018. In addition, he has received a regular grant from the National Science Foundation. Lee has been a mentor and supervisor to many doctoral, undergraduate and even high school students. He is passionate about computer science and feels it’s important to provide accessibility and opportunities to students starting at a young age as the field is growing rapidly.

Here is a full list of Koehl and Lee’s colleagues who received major awards from July 1, 2018 – August 31, 2019:

• Prem Devanbu, ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference Test of Time Award, Association for Computing Machinery Fellow, 10-Year Most Influential Paper Award (Mining Software Repositories 2019)
• Vladimir Filkov, ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference Test of Time Award
• Xin Liu, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow, Mozilla Responsible Computer Science Challenge
• Zhou Yu, Amazon Alexa Prize AI Challenge
• David Doty, National Science Foundation Early CAREER Award
• Biswanath Mukherjee, UC Davis Faculty Distinguished Research Award
• Cindy Rubio-Gonzalez, Department of Energy Early Career Award
• Raissa D’Souza, ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference Test of Time Award, Euler Award (Network Science Society), Network Science Society Fellow

Visit the College of Engineering website for a full list of winners.