Amy Ousterhout, a computer scientist at the University of California San Diego, is part of the first cohort of researchers recognized with the 2025 Google ML and Systems Junior Faculty Award.
The recipients–50 assistant professors from 27 U.S. universities–were selected by Google for leading the analysis, design, and implementation of efficient, scalable, secure, and trustworthy computing systems.
Ousterhout, an assistant professor in the UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering, is broadly interested in operating systems and networks in datacenters. Her research focuses on improving efficiency of applications in datacenters while maintaining fast response times and supporting high request rates.
In short, Ousterhout hopes to achieve high performance using less hardware. For example, she is exploring how to offload tasks from CPUs to specialized accelerators, which have better performance per power.
The Google ML and Systems Junior Faculty Award provides grants of up to $100,000 per faculty member to support research efforts across the technology stack, from algorithms, to software and hardware, to enabling machine learning and cloud computing at an increasingly massive scale. This new award, along with Google’s other faculty and scholar programs, aims to foster academic excellence and inspire the next wave of pioneering research in computer science.
By Kimberley Clementi