CSE alumnus Tim Sherwood (Ph.D. '03) is the recipient of a prestigious award honoring mid-career computer architects. Sherwood is the 2016 recipient of the ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award, named for the computing pioneer credited with proposing microprogramming in 1951, long before it was adopted throughout the computer industry.
The annual award acknowledges an outstanding contribution to computer architecture made by an individual in the first 20 years of their career. Sherwood was cited for his "contributions to novel program analysis advancing architectural modeling and security." According to CSE Prof. Dean Tullsen, Sherwood was "recognized for his phase-based analysis and simpoint infrastructure work that he did at UC San Diego, as well as his innovative work at UC Santa Barbara on secure architectures (among many other things)."
The award recipient is now a Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara, where he is also Associate Vice Chancellor for Research. He joined UCSB in 2003 after receiving his M.S. and Ph.D. that same year from CSE at UC San Diego. His advisor at the time was Brad Calder, now an adjunct professor in CSE while working full-time at Google as a VP of Engineering (following eight years at Microsoft).
Sherwood co-directs the Computer Architecture Lab at UC Santa Barbara. He is also a regular collaborator and co-author with CSE Prof. Ryan Kastner, most recently in November 2015, in a paper on "Quantifying Timing-Based Information Flow in Cryptographic Hardware," presented at the International Conference on Computer Aided Design in Austin, TX. That paper also featured several UCSD Ph.D. student co-authors, including Jason Oberg, Alric Althoff and Janarbek Matai. In 2014, Sherwood also co-authored a paper with Ryan Kastner, Jason Oberg and Sarah Meiklejohn -- all based at UC San Diego.