Andrés Monroy-Hernández and Ravi Netravali win SEAS junior faculty awards

Andrés Monroy-Hernández, an expert in human-computer interaction, has won the Lawrence Keyes, Jr./Emerson Electric Co. Faculty Advancement Award. Ravi Netravali, an expert in systems and networking, has won the Howard B. Wentz, Jr. Junior Faculty Award. Both awards are from Princeton's School of Engineering and Applied Science and recognize the achievements of junior faculty. 

An assistant professor of computer science, Andrés Monroy-Hernández is an expert on how people interact with computational technology. He has published broadly in the field, on topics ranging from the development of wearable devices to studies of large data sets of online activities. His main research focus is social computing, understanding how people connect and collaborate through technology.

He leads the Human-Computer Interaction Lab and is co-appointed with the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education. For his work he has received awards from the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the ACM Conference on Weblogs and Social Media and the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing. He was named one of Latin America’s Innovators under 35 by the MIT Technology Review and one of the most influential Latinos in Tech by CNET.

Prior to joining Princeton in 2022, Monroy-Hernández was the principal research scientist at Snap Inc. and a scientist at Microsoft Research.  In his nomination letter, department chair Szymon Rusinkiewicz noted Monroy-Hernández’s “extraordinarily deep background as an adviser and a mentor,” including many published research collaborations with undergraduates and graduate students. “Andrés is truly an indispensable visionary in defining what computer science and SEAS will look like going forward, and what values it will represent,” said Rusinkiewicz.

An assistant professor of computer science, Ravi Netravali focuses on building practical systems to improve the performance and debugging of large-scale, distributed applications for both end users and developers. His research has been recognized with a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Google Faculty Research Award, an ACM SoCC Best Paper Award, and an IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize. Prior to joining Princeton in 2021, Netravali was an assistant professor of computer science at the University of California-Los Angeles.

“The distributed applications that Ravi builds, ranging from video and mobile systems to large-scale machine learning inference and training, are the engines behind the internet’s revolutionary integration into nearly every aspect of society. But in order to keep pace with the scale and functionality demanded, these services have evolved into complex networked systems that are difficult to deploy, optimize and debug,” said Rusinkiewicz in nominating him for the award. “Ravi’s work addresses this worsening problem by developing and deploying systems that automatically alter application or platform behavior to boost resource efficiency while ensuring correctness.”