Sherwood – UCSB Graduate Mentor Award

Mentoring graduate students is an essential component of the mission of a research university such as UC Santa Barbara. Mentoring includes training graduate students for careers in research and teaching, and preparing them to meet the highest professional and ethical standards as scholars and researchers. Two College of Engineering faculty, Timothy Sherwood from the Department of Computer Science and Frank Zok of the Materials Department, have received the Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award for the 2020-21 academic year. The Academic Senate established the annual award in 2006 to encourage and reward faculty whose mentoring is considered exemplary. 

“Because this award is the result of my former students writing in support of what I do here, it is just so incredibly special, and I am honored,” said Sherwood, who conducts research in the area of computer architecture, developing novel high-throughput hardware and software methods to monitor and analyze systems for performance anomalies, software bugs, and energy efficiency. “My personal goal as a professor is to help a new generation of engineers prepare to make meaningful, ethical, and lifelong contributions to society through our ever-evolving understanding of computing.

Since joining UCSB’s faculty, Sherwood has served as the primary advisor for twenty-six PhD and master’s students and has sat on review committees for nearly seventy more. His graduate students have earned numerous best paper awards at top conferences and have gone on to enjoy careers as assistant professors, executives, and software engineers at major tech companies. Mentorship, according to Sherwood, is the gateway to a more mutually rewarding state of affairs — partnership.

“Whether we are partnering on achieving learning objectives in the classroom, making breakthrough discoveries in the lab, or even just meeting a desire to learn and improve together, a successful partnership must be built on a foundation of mutual respect, a desire to truly understand one another and share goals and objectives,” said Sherwood, whose previous honors include the Association for Computing Machinery’s Maurice Wilkes Award for outstanding contributions to computer architecture, numerous best paper awards from top conferences, and the Academic Senate’s Distinguished Teaching Award. “It is an amazing thing to see a student grow well beyond their own expectations, and even better when they see that they can help others do the same! That is why I do it, to help expand our own sense of what is possible and to realize the previously unimaginable.” 

UC Santa Barbara’s Academic Senate recognizes faculty members and graduate students each year for excellence in teaching and mentorship. This year, three faculty from the College of Engineering and one graduate student were honored for outstanding achievements in a range of activities that support the research and teaching missions of the university. Committee members selected recipients from a pool of nominations submitted by current graduate students, recent alumni, and colleagues. Winners will be honored by the Faculty Legislature during a virtual ceremony to be held later this spring.

COE News – "Recognizing Excellence" (full article)