Author: Kristine White

Each year, the Allen School recognizes outstanding former students with exceptional records of achievement with the Alumni Impact Award. This year’s honorees David Dawson (B.S., ‘06) and Nodira Khoussainova (Ph.D., ‘12) have combined their computing skillset with their entrepreneurial spirit to build companies that are making a positive impact in people’s lives.

“David and Nodira are exceptional role models for our graduates. They demonstrate how you can bring the technical skills unique to a computing education to bear on matters of community and societal well being that we can all relate to,” said Dan Grossman, professor and vice director of the Allen School. “Their passion as entrepreneurs springs from this through line from technical problem solving to finding important issues others have overlooked.”

Dawson and Khoussainova will be formally honored at the 2026 Allen School graduation celebration on June 12 — showcasing to a new class of alumni what can be accomplished with an Allen School education. 

David Dawson (B.S., ‘06): Building meaningful startups with the “right mix of mission, people and opportunity.”

David Dawson got his start in technology and entrepreneurship in high school building websites for local businesses. Since then, his career has been defined by a series of technical co-founder and early engineering roles at multiple Pacific Northwest startups. Along the way, he worked with members of the Seattle technology community — including many fellow Allen School alumni — who would go on to become lifelong collaborators, with the goal of building technologies that make a difference.

“One of the things I love about getting a company going from the ground up and building relationships with people who are also trying to create this thing that doesn’t exist is that it taps into an optimism and passion that keeps you going,” Dawson said. 

After graduating from the Allen School, Dawson followed some of his University of Washington alumni to Zillow as one of the company’s first software engineers. The experience was his “first foray into starting something more from scratch” where he learned the ins and outs of startup life and how to creatively solve problems. That skillset helped him co-found his next two business ventures — a loyalty rewards program called Stash Hotel Rewards that helps independent hotels compete with larger chains, and Leah’s Kitchen, a dinner delivery service that makes home cooked meals more accessible for busy families. While each startup had vastly different focuses, Dawson said each one brought together the “right mix of mission, people and opportunity.”

The seeds of resilience that I’ve been able to build over the years really started there at the Allen School, where I learned that it’s okay to fail some and pick yourself up and ask for help.

In 2018, Dawson co-founded Ridwell, a subscription service that makes it easier for households to recycle items that can’t be easily recycled curbside with the goal of building a future without waste. The company takes in items such as multilayer plastics, styrofoam, light bulbs and electronics and transports them to local partners who specialize in giving the materials a second life to keep them out of landfills. Ridwell began as CEO Ryan Metzger and his son driving around North Seattle collecting hard to recycle items from neighbors, and Dawson offered to help on the technology side. Along with two other co-founders, they turned the mailing list of Seattle neighborhoods to a subscription recycling business that spans more than 150,000 customers across the country. While Dawson has stepped aside as the company’s head of engineering, he still maintains an advisory role.

Dawson credits his time at the Allen School with giving him the skillset, mentorship and opportunities to help his career grow. 

“The seeds of resilience that I’ve been able to build over the years really started there at the Allen School, where I learned that it’s okay to fail some and pick yourself up and ask for help,” said Dawson. “The instructors, professors and advisers who helped me find my way — I’m only starting to appreciate it now, but these connections and people are what matters when you think about going out and getting a job and doing great things.”

Next, Dawson is focused on helping everyday builders in his community use artificial intelligence to bring their ideas to life. That includes collaborating with his wife (a fellow Husky) to grow her coaching business and working with other colleagues on smaller, AI-driven projects. 

Nodira Khoussainova (Ph.D., ‘12): Developing technology that protects human attention instead of stealing it

Nodira Khoussainova, CEO and co-founder of the online social coworking platform Focused Space, is doing something that feels almost countercultural these days: building a company whose entire purpose is the protection of human attention.

“The most important work that’s happening in the tech industry right now involves protecting human attention instead of stealing it, and creating space for authentic human connection instead of just chasing engagement metrics,” Khoussainova said.

That clarity of purpose was first shaped during her time at the Allen School, where she was advised by professors Magdalena Balazinska and Dan Suciu of the UW Database Group. She said that Balazinska taught her the basis of systems thinking and how to look at a problem and break it down into a system of interconnected parts and constraints. For Khoussainova, that’s a skill she uses every day as a founder, since “running a company is basically a systems problem.” From Suciu, she learned what she describes as “principled thinking,” or digging deep into issues and pushing against one’s own assumptions, which has shaped how she evaluates ideas and makes decisions. In the labs and hallways of the Allen School, Khoussainova said she also learned that technology is only as meaningful as the humans it serves.

“At the Allen School, there’s this deep sense of responsibility and thoughtfulness about the impact technology is having on society,” Khoussainova said. “It was in the air. I was living and breathing that culture. It’s why I’m building the technology I’m building.”

After completing her Ph.D., Khoussainova went deep into industry. She co-founded Streamlit, a developer tool for AI and machine learning engineers that was later acquired by Snowflake, and led the experimentation team at X (formerly Twitter). She was at the frontier, watching up close how technology was reshaping human behavior and affecting people’s mental health.

In 2021, Khoussainova co-founded Focused Space, which helps creatives, entrepreneurs and academics concentrate on their work and achieve their goals through “body doubling.” Body doubling is a technique where people work alongside one another, such as in a coffee shop or an online video space. It helps a person sit down and focus on tasks they have been meaning to finish. 

She created the company initially for herself as a passion project. “I’ve always been someone who cares deeply about my work, and I love the state you get into when you can really lock in, but it’s really hard to put aside all distractions,” explained Khoussainova. 

Once she saw the impact she was having on people’s lives — members getting dream jobs, publishing books and launching businesses — she doubled down on the vision. Khoussainova brought on her two co-founders: Justin Trobec from X and fellow UW alum Alexis Hope, a product designer whose work centers on helping people find joy, self-compassion and connection with others.

At the Allen School, there’s this deep sense of responsibility and thoughtfulness about the impact technology is having on society.

The platform is especially helpful for users who are neurodivergent, such as the growing number of adults with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and those who work remotely. Focused Space offers more than 100 expert-facilitated online body doubling sessions throughout the work week across multiple time zones, and provides other tools for goal setting, productivity and more. For example, the company also partners with a network of therapists, coaches and educators who offer workshops on topics such as stress management. Focused Space recently went public in the Apple App Store and launched its own social video platform.

Read more about the Alumni Impact Award here.

University of Washington student group AVELA – A Vision for Engineering Literacy & Access is making STEM education more accessible to more students. The organization provides free courses and workshops for kindergarten to high school students in topics such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality and robotics, while pairing learners with college, graduate and professional mentors.

At the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026) in April, AVELA co-founders and Allen School Ph.D students Vicente Arroyos and Kyle Johnson received a SIGCHI Special Recognition “for building an impactful mentorship ecosystem that empowers thousands of underrepresented youth and strengthens community-rooted STEM learning and workforce development.”

We recently spoke with Arroyos and Johnson to learn more about AVELA and their work. 

What is AVELA?

Vicente Arroyos: AVELA started out here at the University of Washington as a student organization in 2019, and grew into a 501(c)3 nonprofit in 2022, but our mission is still the same. We are a STEM outreach organization that uses mentorship to provide STEM experiences to youth, whether that be in industry or in research fields.

Kyle Johnson: AVELA’s model is built around multi-tiered near-peer mentorship. Graduate students mentor undergraduates early in their academic and professional journeys, helping them build technical skills through hands-on, research and community-driven projects. Those undergraduates then translate what they’re learning into engaging lesson plans, workshops and resources that bring emerging areas of computing and engineering to elementary, middle and high school students. Our programs are designed to reach youth who are furthest from educational equity, so we work a lot with students who are first generation, low income as well as those from historically marginalized backgrounds.

Using their talent, energy and leadership, AVELA students are creating measurable changes across the state.

How many students has AVELA worked with?

VA: Since we founded the organization in 2019, AVELA has supported over 500 college instructors in mentoring more than 7,000 K–12 students, delivering more than 125,000 hours of STEM instruction. Between 2024 to 2025 alone, we supported 150 unique college instructors across 77 classrooms in leading 30,419 hours of learning to 2,101 secondary students. This impact would not be possible without our student members. Using their talent, energy and leadership, AVELA students are creating measurable changes across the state.

KJ: I want to highlight the 125,000 hours of STEM instruction, because it shows the depth of AVELA’s engagement with students. When you divide those hours across more than 7,000 students, it comes out to nearly 18 hours of mentorship per student. That is enough time not only to teach technical skills, but to build trust, talk about college and career pathways and support students beyond the project itself. I often say that 50% of the work is STEM education, and the other 50% is life and career mentorship.

How does AVELA choose what kinds of topics to teach to students?

VA: Personally, I had few chances to explore the topics I was interested in as a secondary student, and it was a handful of early opportunities that gave me my first real exposure and sparked that flame. That’s why our priority is letting the students guide the topics.

Today, we’ve expanded well beyond the content we started with. We began with engineering, since that was the interest of our founding group, but as students came through we grew into health-related fields and beyond because the interest was there, from both the K–12 students and the undergrads at the time.

KJ: AVELA’s programming has always evolved with student interests. Most of our projects start when students come to us excited about an emerging technology. That was true with chatbots and AI: before ChatGPT was released in 2022, students were already asking how these systems worked. So in 2021 and 2022, we were building lessons around AI and machine learning because that was what students wanted to learn.

Now, students are excited to work on projects related to microrobotics, quantum computing and extended reality, but they are not stopping at the technology itself. They are going back into their communities, identifying real problems and asking how these tools can be used to solve them.

What is next for AVELA?

VA: There’s been a start in getting mentors going across the nation, but currently we’re still mainly in the greater Seattle area. It’d be great to see the organization and what has been built here be replicated in other cities.

KJ: We don’t have a shortage of undergraduates who want to do this work, nor a shortage of community partners who want them in their classrooms. The challenge has always been building enough buy-in from faculty and professional mentors to support them. Greater mentorship involvement, especially through grants that fund undergraduate roles, would allow AVELA to reach more students with higher quality, and more frequent, lessons. There are many bright students ready to contribute, but expanding access means providing these students meaningful, paid opportunities to grow.

Students are excited to work on projects related to microrobotics, quantum computing and extended reality, but they are not stopping at the technology itself. They are going back into their communities, identifying real problems and asking how these tools can be used to solve them.

In addition to Arroyos and Johnson, fellow AVELA co-founder Liban Hussein, who graduated from the UW Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and is now at Boeing, also received a SIGCHI Special Recognition.

Learn more about the 2026 SIGCHI Awards here, and more about AVELA’s work here.

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.