Carnegie Mellon University

Sekar receiving the professorship award

June 13, 2017

Sekar honored with Angel Jordan Early Career Professorship

Recently, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Vyas Sekar was awarded the Angel Jordan Early Career Professorship for his contributions in the academic and research sectors of Carnegie Mellon’s engineering department.

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering created the Angel Jordan Early Career Professorship to honor and celebrate the undeniable impact that Angel Jordan (former ECE professor, CIT Dean, and University Provost) has had on Carnegie Mellon and the College of Engineering. Throughout his career, Angel Jordan helped transform Carnegie Mellon into a world-class educational and research institution. He not only conducted research on semi-conductors, integrated circuits, thin films, intelligent sensors, robotics, automation, and software engineering, but he also helped form Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, the Robotics Institute, and the Software Engineering Institute. Overall, Jordan has made countless contributions to the science and engineering fields while also devoting his career to advancing academic excellence and technology at Carnegie Mellon.

In general, professorships help colleges retain outstanding professors, recognize the person for whom the professorship was named, and attract new faculty members conducting seminal research in their field. Representatives from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering created the Angel Jordan Early Career Professorship to bestow appreciation upon a young faculty member who has achieved great feats in the beginning of their career. By honoring a faculty member with a professorship, the ECE department indicates the top-notch quality of its instructors. Assistant Professor Vyas Sekar was recognized as one of these top-notch instructors because of his profound research on networking, security, and systems, and his undeniable teaching abilities.   

During the awards ceremony, Sekar commented on the impact that Angel Jordan had on his own career:

“It is a great honor as a junior faculty member to receive a named professorship in general, especially so when it is named after one of the stalwarts of Carnegie Mellon. As I was reading through Angel’s illustrious career at CMU and beyond, it struck me that in many ways, I couldn’t even be here receiving this award if not for many of his contributions in the past. He was instrumental in the creation of the School of Computer Science which I graduated from and many of the other institutions here that I benefited from in graduate school. It is indeed very humbling to look back at Angel’s amazing technical and service contributions to CMU and the broader engineering and computing community, and it gives me a lot of renewed motivation and drive to try and live up to being a worthy recipient of a professorship named in his honor.”