UCSB Foundation Trustee Mark Bertelsen and his wife, Susan, have made a major gift to establish an endowed chair in computer science at UC Santa Barbara.
The Bertelsens, both UCSB graduates, have chosen to name the chair in memory of Susan Bertelsen’s father, Eugene Aas. The Eugene Aas Chair in Computer Science will be used to attract and support the research of a leading junior faculty member working in the forefront of the discipline.

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.