Personal Mention

Senior Jacob Feldgoise's work on local, state and national policy issues earned him a place as one of 13 James C. Gaither Junior Fellows at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., for 2021-2022. Feldgoise will graduate in May with majors in policy and management in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences; and science, technology and public policy from the Department of Engineering and Public Policy (EPP). He will also receive a minor in Chinese studies. He was previously awarded the Lena Foo Study Abroad Scholarship from CMU's Department of Modern Languages and a David L. Boren Scholarship in 2019 to spend a summer at Shanghai International Studies University through CMU's summer study abroad program. "I've been fortunate to wind up at an institution that prizes and encourages interdisciplinary education and gives you the opportunity to go out and take classes in very different departments. It has allowed me to accumulate a diverse set of skills in different fields," he said. Learn more about Feldgoise.

Ambassador Sarah Mendelson, distinguished service professor of public policy and head of Heinz College in Washington, D.C., was selected last fall to be a member of a bipartisan Task Force on U.S. Strategy to Support Democracy and Counter Authoritarianism. The task force, convened by Freedom House, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and the McCain Institute, will launch its findings as a report on April 14 during a panel discussion that also features as guests Senator Mitt Romney, Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield and Cindy McCain. The task force was formed to address the significant global decline in democratic freedom and the rise in authoritarianism that endanger U.S. national security and the post-World War II political order. Register for the April 14 panel.  Learn more about Mendelson.

Guy Blelloch has received the 2021 Charles Babbage Award from the IEEE Computer Society for his contributions to parallel programming, parallel algorithms and the interface between them. Blelloch, a professor in the Computer Science Department, has studied parallel computing since the 1980s, when it was the foundation of his Ph.D. work. When he started, parallel computing was rare and few people knew how to program for it. Now, parallel systems are ubiquitous. "I like to think that some of the ideas I had over my career have made a difference," Blelloch said. "I try to focus on ideas that will be useful 25 years from now, as opposed to solving a problem we are facing today that might not be relevant years from now." Blelloch has been on the CMU faculty since 1988, and from 2016 to 2020 served as associate dean for undergraduate programs in the School of Computer Science. He is an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) fellow and was chair of the building committee for the Gates and Hillman Centers. Learn more about Blelloch.