The American Academy of Arts & Sciences, one of the nation’s most prestigious honor societies, elected two Allen School faculty as part of its 2026 class of new members — Allen School director and professor Magdalena Balazinska and professor Shwetak Patel. Chartered in 1780, the Academy recognizes exceptional individuals across academia, industry, the arts and more who examine new ideas and address issues of importance to both the nation and the world.
Magdalena Balazinska: The “extraordinary leader” advancing data management and data science education and research
The Academy recognized Allen School director and professor Magdalena Balazinska for her trailblazing contributions and service to the field of data management and data science.
“I’m deeply honored to join the Academy’s distinguished group of leaders past and present from such a large breadth of areas. Since hearing the news, I have been reflecting on how incredibly far science and engineering have come since the founding of the Academy,” said Balazinska, who holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the Allen School. “They have dramatically changed our lives. Yet so many opportunities and also challenges remain ahead of us. And in my own field of data management, for example, AI has the potential to accelerate progress in ways I couldn’t have imagined at the start of my career.”
One of Balazinska’s most influential contributions has been her work with her collaborators on the development of the distributed stream processing system Borealis. The system enabled large-scale, low-latency data processing for a range of applications, from financial services to wireless sensing. Balazinska and her co-authors received a Test of Time Award at the Conference on Innovations Data Systems Research (CIDR 2025) for the paper that introduced Borealis, and another Test of Time Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on the Management of Data (ACM SIGMOD 2017) for developing novel fault-tolerance techniques for distributed stream processing, a critical feature at large scale.
“Magda is well known in the database research community for her contributions to scalable distributed data systems,” said Allen School professor Dan Suciu, her colleague in the UW Database Group. “Her Ph.D. work at MIT developed the first scalable stream data processing engine, called Borealis. Unlike SQL database systems, which have access to data stored locally, a stream data processing engine can only see the data once, and must process it on-the-fly. This required a total re-engineering of the query processing engine and, for her innovation, Magda was recognized with the Test-of-Time Award at the two most prestigious data management conferences.”
Alongside her students and UW collaborators, Balazinska has also developed novel techniques for big data processing and cloud analytics such as those found in Myria, a fast, flexible open-source cloud-based service. More recently, she has turned her attention toward developing efficient data management systems for video and augmented, virtual and mixed reality, including the Video Organization and Compositional AnaLytics (VOCAL) project, a suite of video analytics systems that help users organize and extract information from video datasets.
Balazinska has served as the director of the Allen School since January 2020. Her leadership in the computing community, however, goes beyond the school doors. Prior to assuming her role as Allen School director, Balazinska served as the UW’s Associate Vice Provost for Data Science as well as the director of the eScience Institute, which advances data-intensive discovery across a variety of fields at the University. Balazinska also led the development of the UW Data Science Minor as well as transcriptable data science specializations, called Options, at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The Data Science Option is now offered in over 22 units across campus.
Since hearing the news, I have been reflecting on how incredibly far science and engineering have come since the founding of the Academy. They have dramatically changed our lives.
At the state level, Balazinska serves on Washington’s Artificial Intelligence Task Force, which was created by the legislature to develop recommendations for the potential regulation of AI systems. As part of the task force, she co-chairs two subcommittees — one focused on Education and Workforce Development and a second on Health Care and Accessibility.
Her influence also extends outside of Washington. As the co-founder of the Northwest Database Society, she brought together researchers working in databases and data management systems from across the Pacific Northwest region. Balazinska has also served as both a member and co-chair of the U.S. National Science Foundation Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (NSF CISE) Advisory Committee.
“Magda was elected to the American Academy for her scientific and engineering accomplishments, but she is also an extraordinary leader — of the Allen School and of the entire data management community,” said Allen School professor emeritus Ed Lazowska.
Balazinska’s election to the Academy is one of many recognitions she has received throughout her career. Her other awards include the inaugural VLDB Women in Database Research Award and an NSF CAREER Award. Balazinska is also a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and an elected member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences.
Shwetak Patel: The “incredibly creative” innovator advancing health, sustainability and interaction research
Shwetak Patel, the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Professor in the Allen School and the UW Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, thinks outside the box by bringing together research in human-computer interaction (HCI) with ubiquitous computing and sensor-enabled embedded systems to advance new health and sustainability innovations.
“I’m humbled and honored to be inducted to the AAA&S. To see highly applied computing research celebrated at this level is so rewarding. I hope this serves as a catalyst for others to embrace a broader, more practical perspective on what computing can achieve for society,” said Patel, who is also associate director for development and entrepreneurship in the Allen School.
Many people carry around a smartphone in their pocket, and Patel’s research focuses on leveraging the device’s combined sensing, data processing and communication abilities to expand health care access. Patel, who directs the Allen School’s UbiComp Lab, has pioneered the ability to extract clinical grade signals using these everyday sensing devices to help users continuously monitor their health — which is especially helpful to those in low-resource settings. For example, he and his team developed the app FeverPhone that turns smartphones into thermometers and a smartphone-based glucose and prediabetes screening tool called GlucoScreen.
To help commercialize some of these technologies, Patel founded the mobile health diagnostics company Senosis Health, which was acquired by Google and is now a core part of Google’s consumer health efforts. In addition to his UW faculty position, Patel is Distinguished Scientist and Head of Health Technologies at the company, which developed multiple apps that could screen for various health conditions. These include an app that uses a smartphone’s accelerometer to detect osteoporosis and another that analyzes selfies to screen for pancreatic cancer through changes in the scleral color of a user’s eye.
To see highly applied computing research celebrated at this level is so rewarding. I hope this serves as a catalyst for others to embrace a broader, more practical perspective on what computing can achieve for society.
Another line of Patel’s research looks into using sensing technology to improve the health of the planet and tackle sustainability challenges. For example, he developed low-cost and easy-to-deploy sensor systems that could measure household energy consumption and help residents detect inefficiencies more effectively. Patel founded residential energy monitoring company Zensi, which was later acquired by Belkin, and he also co-founded the low-power wireless sensor platform company called SNUPI Technologies, which was acquired by Sears. More recently, he has helped reduce environmentally hazardous electronic waste by creating recyclable printed circuit boards and introduced AI models to help users better understand the environmental impact of everyday decisions.
“Shwetak’s work is deeply important, impactful, and incredibly creative,” said Jeff Dean (Ph.D., ‘96), chief scientist for Google DeepMind and Google Research. “He has an incredible record of research publication, entrepreneurship, and real-world impact. His health sensing research has been integrated into Google products used by more than one billion people. As a fellow American Academy of Arts & Sciences member, I am proud to see Shwetak’s induction.”
Patel’s election to the Academy is the latest in a string of accolades recognizing the wide-ranging impact of his work. He has also received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 Award, World Economic Forum Young Global Scientist Award, NSF CAREER Award, National Academy of Engineering Gilbreth Award and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).
A Fellow of the ACM, Patel earned that organization’s ACM Prize in Computing for mid-career contributions to the field and was inducted into the SIGCHI Academy by the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction.
Read more about the members of the 2026 class of members in the AAA&S announcement and a related UW News story.