Rising-Star CS Professor Wins VMware Early-Career Faculty Grant

On the heels of being named a rising star in computer networking, Computer Science Professor Aruna Balasubramanian has been awarded a highly selective VMware Early-Career Faculty Grant, which is given to recently appointed faculty whose research interests and accomplishments seem poised to have significant impact within the industry and academia.

VMware’s Early-Career Faculty Grant program is intended to recognize the next generation of exceptional faculty members. Presented as a gift to the researcher’s university, the funding supports research and promotes excellence in teaching.
“Aruna is a rising star in the area of mobile systems research,” said Samir Das, Chair of the Department of Computer Science in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “Her work on mobile web, mobile offloading, and mobile energy efficiency has spawned tremendous follow-up research and has won her several awards. Apart from being an active researcher, her organizational efforts and commitment to advancing women in STEM are stellar.”
As part of the grant, VMware has offered to host visits and seminars as well as provide software that Balasubramanian is free to use in her courses and research efforts. Moreover, VMware said that they would gladly consider Stony Brook computer science students for internship positions and are willing to collaborate on projects. This generous award was distributed to Stony Brook University by Vanguard Charitable, which manages the VMware University Research Fund.
This latest honor follows Professor Balasubramanian’s recent selection as one of only 10 researchers from world-class institutions chosen as N2Women’s rising stars in computer networking in 2018. She shared this honor with researchers from Microsoft and professors from MIT, University of Cambridge and University College London, to name a few. Also, Professor Balasubramanian will serve as the vice general chair of the ACM MobiCom conference — the most prominent conference in mobile computing — in its 25th edition next year.
About the Researcher
Aruna Balasubramanian received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where her dissertation won the UMass outstanding dissertation award and was the Sigcomm dissertation award runner up. She works in the area of networked systems. Her current work consists of two threads: (1) significantly improving mobile Web performance and (2) improving the usability and privacy of mobile systems. She is the recipient of a Ubicomp best paper award, a Computing Innovation Fellowship, a Microsoft Graduate Research Fellowship, a Google research award, an Applied Networking Research Prize, and the VMware Early-Career Faculty Grant. She is passionate about improving the diversity in computer science and runs a Girls Who Code Club, founded the WPhD group for Women PhD students at Stony Brook, and is an active member of the N2Women group.
— Daniel Morgan