Diana Marculescu, the new chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Cockrell School of Engineering, has been named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), an honor awarded to less than 1% of ACM’s membership, for her contributions to the design and optimization of energy-aware computing systems.

ACM named 58 members as Fellows for wide-ranging and fundamental contributions in areas including artificial intelligence, cloud computing, combating cybercrime, quantum computing and wireless networking. ACM describes the accomplishments of the 2019 Fellows as underpinning the technologies that define the digital age and greatly impacting our professional and personal lives.

"Computing technology has had a tremendous impact in shaping how we live and work today,” said ACM President Cherri M. Pancake in announcing the 2019 Fellows. “All of the technologies that directly or indirectly influence us are the result of countless hours of collaborative and/or individual work, as well as creative inspiration and, at times, informed risk-taking. Each year, we look forward to welcoming some of the most outstanding individuals as Fellows. The ACM Fellows program is a cornerstone of our overall recognition effort. In highlighting the accomplishments of the ACM Fellows, we hope to give credit where it is due, while also educating the public about the extraordinary array of areas in which computing professionals work."

The contributions of the 2019 Fellows run the gamut of the many sub-disciplines of the computing field — including artificial intelligence, cloud computing, computer graphics, computational biology, data science, security and privacy, software engineering, quantum computing, web science and many others.

Marculescu is a pioneer in energy-aware computing, with expertise spanning energy- and reliability-aware computing, hardware-aware machine learning and computing for sustainability and natural science applications. She began her appointment as electrical and computer engineering department chair earlier this month, joining the Cockrell School from Carnegie Mellon University, where she served on faculty for nearly two decades. At Carnegie Mellon, she also served as founding director of the Center for Faculty Success, developing programs for faculty recruiting, mentoring, development and diversity/inclusion awareness for over 300 faculty members in engineering and across other colleges at the university. In addition to numerous other national and international recognitions, Marculescu is a Fellow of IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

The 2019 class of ACM Fellows will be recognized at an event next June.