End of Year Awards
Welcome! This page celebrates the outstanding students and faculty members receiving one of our Paul G. Allen School end of year awards. Join us in recognizing their achievements, impact, and contributions to the Allen School community.
2026 Award Winners
Undergraduate Service Award
The Service Award honors graduating seniors who significantly enhance the Allen School community through extraordinary service and dedication.
- Hawa Drammeh
- Joban Mand
- Ishan Sinha
- Vaishnavi Vidyasagar
Best Senior & Master’s Thesis Award
The selection of the best senior thesis is based on the originality, impact, and written quality of the work.
- Best Senior Thesis Winner: Code as a Substrate toward LLM Self-Improvement
- Kaiyuan Liu, supervised by Natasha Jaques
- Best Senior Thesis Runner Up: Navigating Language Model Training Data with Scalable N-gram Search
- Hao Xu, supervised by Hanna Hajishirzi
- Best Master’s Thesis Winner: Does This Even Matter in the Real World? Real World Problems in Foundational Theory Courses
- Anna Kuznetsova, supervised by Robbie Weber
Outstanding Allen School Senior Award Recipients
The Outstanding Senior Award honors undergraduates who demonstrate exceptional academic performance, significant contributions to the advancement of knowledge, leadership, and good citizenship.
- Hao Xu
- Tong Lin
- Weikai Huang
Bob Bandes Memorial TA Award
The Bob Bandes Memorial Award recognizes exceptional performance by undergraduate and graduate students serving as teaching assistants in the Allen School.
- Winners
- Evan Keola Lam
- Isabel Marguerite Froelich
- Hayden Bradford Feeney
- Honorable Mentions
- Parker Thomas Gustafson
- Trien Vuong
- Ivory Wang
- Jonathan Trinh
COM^2 Hal Perkins Undergraduate Teaching Award
The Hal Perkins Undergraduate Teaching Award is named in honor of teaching professor Hal Perkins, who retired in 2026 after 28 years of service to the Allen School. The award, which is sponsored by student organization COM^2, recognizes Allen School faculty for excellence in teaching.
- Nirvan Tyagi, Assistant Professor
- Robbie Weber, Assistant Teaching Professor
- Kevin Zatloukal, Professor