Emily Fox, Amazon Professor of Machine Learning, has been selected to receive a 2017 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government upon scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers.
Fox is among 102 scientists and engineers (only 19 via the National Science Foundation) who are being recognized by the White House for advancing the frontiers of science and technology and serving the community through scientific leadership, public education, and community outreach.
“I congratulate these outstanding scientists and engineers on their impactful work,” said President Barack Obama in a press release announcing the winners. “These innovators are working to help keep the United States on the cutting edge, showing that Federal investments in science lead to advancements that expand our knowledge of the world around us and contribute to our economy.”
PECASE winners are chosen from among nominees submitted by a dozen federal agencies and the intelligence community for making significant contributions to America’s continuing leadership in science and technology. Fox was nominated for the award by the National Science Foundation for her “groundbreaking work in large-scale Bayesian modeling and computational approaches to time series and longitudinal data analysis, and for outstanding outreach and mentoring of women in computer science and statistics.”
In addition to her Amazon Professorship (with appointments in Statistics and CSE), Fox is a Data Science Fellow in UW’s eScience Institute and co-created the UW’s Coursera specialization in machine learning in collaboration with UW CSE professor Carlos Guestrin. The PECASE is the latest in a long list of honors for Fox, who is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship, ONR Young Investigator Award, NSF CAREER Award and the MIT EECS Jin-Au Kong Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Prize, among many others. Fox’s research has been applied in a wide range of domains, including neuroscience, finance and econometrics, social networking, and more.
Fox is one of two UW recipients of the PECASE this year. She is joined by Catherine Karr, professor of pediatrics in the School of Medicine and environmental and occupational health sciences in the School of Public Health, who was nominated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Past PECASE recipients include UW CSE and Electrical Engineering professor Shwetak Patel and UW CSE professors Tom Anderson, Carlos Guestrin, and Luke Zettlemoyer.
Read the White House press release here and the UW release here.
Congratulations, Emily!