Karl and Pamela Lopker and the Lopker Family Foundation have made a major gift to help establish the first endowed chair in computer science in UCSB’s College of Engineering (COE).
The endowed professorship will support the teaching and research activities of a distinguished scholar recruited to fill the position. The donors have named the chair in honor of Venkatesh “Venky” Narayanamurti, a dynamic leader and distinguished physicist who served as COE’s dean from 1992 until 1998. He left to become Harvard University’s dean of engineering and applied sciences.

Haitao Zheng, an assistant professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara, has been named one of the nation’s top 35 innovators under age 35 by MIT’s Technology Review magazine. The magazine recognized Haitao, 30, and other chemists, biologists, software engineers, and chip designers for gravitating to “the most interesting and difficult scientific and engineering problems at hand, and arrive at solutions no one had imagined. They take on big issues.”

Tim Sherwood, an Assistant Professor in Computer Science, received the early Career award from the National Science Foundation to fund his research on high speed architectures for online security analysis. The research focus is in building specialized computer processors that are engineered to sort through suspicious packets, and developing new algorithms for hardware string matching.

Assistant Professor Chandra Krintz was one of ten top compiler and programming language researchers world-wide selected by Microsoft Research as a funded participant in the Microsoft Phoenix Project. As part of the project, Chandra and her research group, the RACELab, will investigate state-of-the-art program profiling and adaptive compiler and runtime optimization for the Microsoft .Net Framework.