As excitement builds across campus among soon-to-be graduates embarking on the start of their careers, one member of the University of Washington community is reveling in the opportunity to look back upon his. This week, Ed Lazowska, professor and Bill & Melinda Gates Chair emeritus in the Allen School, will receive the UW Distinguished Teaching Legacy Award honoring “UW educators whose profound influence continues to shape the lives of their students long after they’ve left the classroom.”
“Wow, congratulations Ed!!!” wrote Julie Kientz, professor and chair of the UW Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering and adjunct professor in the Allen School. “I always thought you had to be dead to get this particular award, but clearly not — glad they were able to honor you with it while you are alive and kicking. 🙂 Very well deserved!”
The award represents a kind of closure. In 1995, as chair of what was then the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Lazowska put forward two junior professors, Gaetano Borriello and Carl Ebeling, for another honor, the Distinguished Teaching Award. Lazowska wanted to recognize the pair together for their leadership in developing the department’s new computer engineering curriculum.
There was a problem, though: the University didn’t give teaching awards to teams, just individuals, based on the now-outdated conviction that teaching was a solo activity. Having convinced the powers that be that it would be appropriate to recognize both Borriello and Ebeling, Lazowska was confronted with another surprise. Back then, the UW gave out a teaching award for each professorial rank. It turned out that he was the highest ranked candidate in the full professor category, and the office that administered the awards declined to give more than one to the same unit in the same year.
Presented with the choice, Lazowska chose Borriello and Ebeling. For the first time (but not the last), the University rewarded a team for excellence in teaching. And Lazowska, at his own insistence, missed out.
“It’s fulfilling to get a teaching award after all these years,” he said with a smile. “It’s really lovely.”
It was also unexpected. Nominator Patrick Jenny (B.S., ‘91) has remained active in the UW Alumni Association (UWAA) and stayed in touch with Lazowska over the years, but the latter never saw it coming.
“As an educator, his class was engaging,” Jenny wrote about his former professor. “He was accessible and brought excitement into a deep and technical class.”
That class was CSE 451, an undergraduate operating systems course that Lazowska taught for many years. It is, as he describes it, a “really hardcore” course that enables students to gain experience in building complex systems. While there is a textbook, the course is designed to allow students to “get their hands dirty” while learning how to collaborate and problem-solve as part of a team. Lazowska taught the Unix offering, while affiliate professor Gary Kimura (Ph.D., ‘84) taught a Windows version.
“Our region excels at systems engineering, whether it’s operating systems or the cloud,” Lazowska noted. “We work hard to prepare our students to be successful working in teams to build these complex systems, and we’ve educated generations of students to go out and do that.”
Jenny was among them. After graduating from the UW, he held a series of software engineering and product development roles before joining the leadership of F5 Networks. There, he spent over 18 years overseeing global product development, first as vice president and then senior vice president, as the company established itself as a mainstay of the Seattle technology industry.
Ed’s nominations spoke powerfully to his influence on generations of students — academically, professionally and personally.
Like Jenny, former student Rob Short (M.S., ‘86) was struck by how Lazowska approached his students and his subject matter — in this case, a computer performance analysis course he taught jointly with faculty colleague John Zahorjan.
“I was immediately impressed with his interest in the students, incredible depth and breadth of knowledge and the ease with which he used math, specifically queuing theory, to analyze and understand complex systems,” Short recalled. “I was an unusual student, having worked in the computer industry for years without a formal education in computer science. Ed, along with others, was incredibly supportive introducing me to abstract methods for understanding systems which I used throughout my career.”
Short logged 15 years at Digital Equipment Corporation before joining Microsoft, where he led a design team and later became Corporate Vice President of Windows Core Technology overseeing the company’s flagship operating system. He remained engaged with his alma mater and watched as Lazowska helped build the Allen School into the “powerhouse” that it is known as today.
“The top tech companies all have deeply technical science and engineering groups in the Seattle region, thanks to UW CSE,” Short said. “All through this time, Ed continued to teach and mentor a huge number of students. His students are now leading faculty members at top universities and technical leaders at the very top tech companies.”
Such outcomes are very important to Lazowska, who speaks enthusiastically about the “multiplicative power” of the hundreds of students faculty members touch each year.
“At the undergraduate level, these great students largely from the state of Washington come into the Allen School, and we try to help them along the way to great careers — and also turn them into well-rounded, educated people,” Lazowska said. “It’s not purely a technical education. And they eventually go out into the world and do amazing things.”
Lazowska believes in the aforementioned multiplicative power so completely that even after “retiring” he continues to teach an entrepreneurship course with Greg Gottesman, co-founder and managing director of Pioneer Square Labs, that attracts undergraduate and graduate students from across the campus.
I’ve always thought that our most important and highest impact role is as educators.
“The Distinguished Teaching Legacy Award is especially meaningful because it is based on alumni nominations — invited by the UW Alumni Association — and recognizes a faculty member’s lasting impact on students’ lives and careers,” said Paul Rucker, vice president of alumni and stakeholder engagement at the UW and executive director of the UWAA. “Ed’s nominations spoke powerfully to his influence on generations of students — academically, professionally and personally — many of whom have gone on to shape and disrupt the technology industry in Seattle and beyond. We are honored to recognize him with this award.”
That his selection was alumni-driven makes this award — and the timing of it — particularly special in Lazowska’s mind.
“What really matters to us as teachers is what our students go on to achieve afterwards, and Patrick and Rob have achieved an extraordinary amount,” Lazowska said. “It’s so gratifying that when they look back at their UW education, they view it as having really impacted them.
“I’ve always thought that our most important and highest impact role is as educators,” Lazowska continued. “So this is an incredibly meaningful way to wind up my career.”
Jenny would agree — and take it a step further.
“I know that I am a better leader, engineer and Husky because of Ed’s impact in my life,” he said. “The same is true of Seattle and the UW.”
Learn more about the UW Awards of Excellence here, and read coverage of Lazowska’s recognition in the University of Washington Magazine and GeekWire.