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(L-R) Richard Andersen, Anima Anandkumar, and Steven H. Low (Photos – Caltech)
Three Caltech Professors, Richard Andersen, Anima Anandkumar, and Steven H. Low, received awards in Neuroscience and Electrical Engineering.
By News Desk
– Richard Andersen
2024 International Prize for Translational Neuroscience
Richard Andersen, the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience and director and Leadership Chair of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Brain-Machine Interface Center at Caltech, has been awarded the 2024 International Prize for Translational Neuroscience of the Gertrud Reemtsma Foundation. The Gertrud Reemtsma Foundation supports and recognizes outstanding achievements in basic neurological research. Andersen shares the prize with Karl Friston of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London.
Andersen studied biochemistry at the UC Davis, and he earned his doctorate in physiology from the UC San Francisco in 1979. He subsequently spent time as a postdoctoral research fellow at Johns Hopkins Medical School and as an assistant professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California. He became an associate professor in 1987 and then professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990.
Andersen joined the Caltech faculty in 1993. The focus of his research is exploring the neural mechanisms of sight, hearing, balance, touch, and action. He then uses the insights gained from these investigations to inform the development of neural prosthetics. His approach has enabled paralyzed patients to control robotics and computers that allow them to drink a beverage, play a computer piano, use programs like Adobe Photoshop, and feel the sensation of touch in hands and arms previously been rendered insensate from spinal cord injury.
– Anima Anandkumar
2025 IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award
Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, and Steven H. Low, the Frank J. Gilloon Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and Electrical Engineering, have been selected to receive 2025 IEEE Technical Field Awards.
Anandkumar will be honored with the 2025 IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award for outstanding early- to mid-career contributions to technologies holding the promise of innovative applications. Low will receive the Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, which is awarded for outstanding contributions to the integration of computers and communications.
The citation from the IEEE says Anandkumar is being honored “[f]or contributions to AI, including tensor methods and neural operators with applications to scientific domains.” Anandkumar is a leader in artificial intelligence (AI) research and has helped develop unifying theoretical frameworks for machine learning algorithms, especially techniques called tensor methods and neural operators that revolve around partial differential equations, which Anandkumar calls “the workhorses of science and math.”
Anandkumar, who is an affiliated faculty member with the Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies, received her bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institutes of Technology – Madras in 2004 and her doctoral degree from Cornell University in 2009. She completed postdoctoral research at MIT and an assistant professorship at the UC Irvine before coming to Caltech as a visiting associate in 2017. She was named Bren Professor at Caltech that same year.
– Steven H. Low
2025 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award
Steven H. Low is being honored by IEEE with the Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award “[f]or contributions to the theoretical foundation and practical implementation of Internet congestion control.” Low’s research focuses on cyber-physical systems, networking, and smart grid. Low is perhaps best known for the development of a mathematical theory of internet congestion control and the design and deployment of a congestion control algorithm known as FAST TCP for high-speed data transfer over long distances. That protocol has been accelerating more than 1 terabyte of internet traffic every second since 2014.
Since about 2010, Low’s lab, which he calls the Netlab, has focused on solving optimal power flow problems for smart grid applications.
Low earned his bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 1987 and his doctoral degree from UC Berkeley in 1992. Before joining the Caltech faculty as an associate professor in 2000, Low was at AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey and the University of Melbourne in Australia. He was named a full professor in 2006 and the Gilloon Professor in 2018.
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