{"id":110501,"date":"2021-09-22T09:37:44","date_gmt":"2021-09-22T13:37:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/?p=110501"},"modified":"2024-03-01T15:06:17","modified_gmt":"2024-03-01T20:06:17","slug":"three-awarded-career-development-professorships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/2021\/09\/22\/three-awarded-career-development-professorships\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Awarded Career Development Professorships"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three assistant professors have earned professorships that recognize future leaders in their fields, Boston University Provost Jean Morrison has announced. Abdoulaye Ndao<\/a> was named the next Reidy Family Career Development Professor, while Eshed Ohn-Bar<\/a> and Ashok Cutkosky<\/a> each garnered a Peter J. Levine Career Development Professorship.<\/p>\n

The Reidy and Levine professorships are two of the six Career Development Professorships that BU offers to certain junior faculty noted for significant potential in their disciplines. A three-year stipend supports research, scholarship and creative work, as well as a portion of the recipients\u2019 salaries.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese awards highlight the excellence of our ECE department, and the talent and potential of these three outstanding faculty,\u201d said College of Engineering Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen. \u201cThey can serve as springboards to propel the careers of these junior faculty to great achievements.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Peter Levine (ENG’83)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Peter J. Levine (ENG\u201983) created the Peter J. Levine Career Development Professorship to help recruit and develop top-notch junior faculty at the College of Engineering. A general partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz, Levine is a former BU trustee and a current member of the ENG Dean\u2019s Leadership Advisory Board.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Peter J. Levine Career Development Professorship honors creative and exciting new assistant professors in ECE, particularly in the area of information science and technology, and those adjectives certainly apply to both Eshed Ohn-Bar and Ashok Cutkosky,\u201d says Professor W. Clem Karl, ECE chair. \u201cEshed\u2019s research is focused on machine learning for autonomous systems such as self-driving cars that learn by watching other cars. Ashok comes to BU from Google, and is focused on machine learning algorithms that can avoid the problems of manual tuning.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Ashok Cutkosky (ECE, SE)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Cutkosky, who also has an appointment in Systems Engineering, joined BU in July 2020 after two years as a research scientist at Google Research in Mountain View, California. His research in hyperparameter tuning is aimed at developing algorithms that take the guesswork out of building and training machine learning models. Cutkosky earned his PhD in computer science from Stanford University.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was an extremely pleasant surprise,\u201d says Cutkosky of learning he had been named a Levine professor. \u201cI plan to use the award to support some students, because a lot of my work is very mathematical, so hiring students to help with that will free me up to spend time training machine learning models, and also work on algorithms that maintain privacy in the data sets.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ohn-Bar joined BU last year after two years as a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. He earned his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of California at San Diego. In his research, he seeks to develop societal-scale intelligent systems with seamless real-world interaction. Examples include safety applications for autonomous driving and assisted navigation for people with visual impairments.<\/p>\n

\"Eshed
Eshed Ohn-Bar (ECE)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThis is a difficult interdisciplinary task, primarily because the decision-making must safely account for interactions with real-world humans, who have diverse behaviors and preferences,\u201d says Ohn-Bar. \u201cThe Peter J. Levine Career Development Professorship Award gives me the additional resources required to pursue this bold and socially impactful research. I plan to use the award to ensure that our research results in broadly applicable real-world assistive and autonomous technologies.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Reidy Family Career Development Professorship recognizes the outstanding record and significant scholarly potential of Abdoulaye Ndao, and I could not agree more,\u201d says Karl. \u201cAbdoulaye has made ground-breaking contributions in the development of topological light sources, metamaterials, and sensors based on lithium niobate.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Abdoulaye Ndao (ECE)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Focusing on light-matter interactions at the nanometer scale, Ndao\u2019s work has implications for digital imaging and medical diagnostics. He joined BU in July 2020, after doing postdoctoral work at UC\u2013Berkeley and UC\u2013San Diego. Ndao earned his PhD in physics from the University of Franche-Comt\u00e9 in France.<\/p>\n

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Richard Reidy (Questrom’82)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The professorship is supported by a gift from Richard Reidy (Questrom\u201982) and his wife Minda Reidy (Questrom\u201982, \u201984). The couple created the professorship as a way to attract and retain the best faculty at ENG as well as the Questrom School of Business. Richard Reidy was president and CEO of Progress Software Corp. and is now principal partner of StratusPointIT. He is vice chair of the BU Board of Trustees and a member emeritus of the ENG Dean\u2019s Leadership Advisory Board.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis prestigious award will give visibility to my research and provide funds for equipment,\u201d says Ndao. \u201cIt speaks to how well my work is perceived in the department\u201d and beyond, he added. \u201cThis award is an extrinsic incentive and will serve as an additional motivator.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAll three of these outstanding new assistant professors build on our current strengths in photonics and AI,\u201d says Karl. \u201cTheir generous Career Development Professorships are well deserved acknowledgements of their potential, and support for their future success.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three assistant professors have earned professorships that recognize future leaders in their fields, Boston University Provost Jean Morrison has announced. Abdoulaye Ndao was named the next Reidy Family Career Development Professor, while Eshed Ohn-Bar and Ashok Cutkosky each garnered a Peter J. Levine Career Development Professorship. The Reidy and Levine professorships are two of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[236,257,1142,977,907,1162,239,910],"tags":[765,766,752,767,768,769],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110501"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110501"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":146497,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110501\/revisions\/146497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}