Peter Chen voted 2019 HKN Professor of the Year in CSE

EECS students voted, and Thurnau Professor Peter Chen was named the 2018-2019 HKN Professor of the Year in CSE by the Beta-Epsilon chapter of Eta Kappa Nu (HKN), the national honor society for electrical and computer engineers.

The Professor of the Year Award is awarded based on popular vote by all undergraduate and graduate students in programs administered by the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.  This is the fifth time than Chen has received this honor.

Chen has a deep commitment to student education and mentoring, and also serves as the Chief Program Advisor for the computer science undergraduate program offered through the College of Engineering. He mainly teaches courses related to computing systems, computer organization, and operating systems, and has developed the curriculum for several of these courses.

Chen has been recognized for his work as an educator by the University, the College, and the EECS Department. He was named an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor by the University in 2007 and also received the U-M Amoco Undergraduate Teaching Award. He has received the 1938E Award, the Engineering Teaching Excellence Award, and the Neil Van Eenam Memorial Teaching Award from the College of Engineering. He has received the Departmental Teaching Excellence Award and an Outstanding Achievement Award from the EECS Department for his teaching and mentoring activities.

Chen is equally well-known as a researcher in the area of operating systems, where he has made substantial contributions on the topics of reliable memory, virtual machine security, and speculative execution for distributed file systems. He received an NSF CAREER Award in 1996 and the ACM-SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award in 2007, and has received over a dozen best paper awards, including one paper that was included in the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame in 2015. He is a Fellow of ACM and IEEE.