2008-2009 Richard P. Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching

Caltech's Shuki Bruck Wins Feynman Prize for Teaching

February 24, 2009

Jehoshua "Shuki" Bruck, Caltech's Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of Computation and Neural Systems and Electrical Engineering, has been awarded the Richard P. Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Caltech's most prestigious teaching honor, the award comes with a $3,500 cash prize, plus an equivalent raise in annual salary.

The Feynman Prize was established in 1993 "to honor annually a professor who demonstrates, in the broadest sense, unusual ability, creativity, and innovation in undergraduate and graduate classroom or laboratory teaching." Any member of the Caltech community, including faculty, students, postdoctoral scholars, alumni, and staff, may nominate a faculty member for the award, and the winner is selected by a committee appointed by the provost.

A member of the Caltech faculty since 1994, Bruck was the founding director of the Information Science and Technology (IST) program from 2003 to 2005. His research combines work on the design of distributed information systems and the theoretical study of biological circuits and systems.

He received his BSc and MSc degrees in electrical engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in 1982 and 1985, respectively, and his PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1989.

Bruck has extensive industrial experience, including working with IBM Research for 10 years, where he participated in the design and implementation of the first IBM parallel computer. He was cofounder and chairman of Rainfinity (acquired in 2005 by EMC), a spin-off company from Caltech that focused on software products for management of network information systems.

He is a fellow of the IEEE and the recipient of an IBM Partnership Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, six IBM Plateau Invention Achievement Awards, an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award, and an IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award.

Bruck has published more than 200 journal and conference papers in his areas of interests and holds 25 US patents.

Previous winners of the Feynman Prize have included chemical engineer Zhen-Gang Wang, planetary scientist Michael Brown, and engineer Richard Murray.