The Gaetano Borriello Endowed Fellowship for Change

The Gaetano Borriello Endowed Fellowship for Change, established in 2015, has two purposes: to enable UW Computer Science & Engineering to support students whose work is focused on exploring how technology can improve the lives of underserved populations, and to honor the scholarship of Gaetano Borriello, his leadership in teaching and research, and his contributions to UW CSE.

Gaetano joined the UW CSE faculty in 1988, following receipt of his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. He had previously received an M.S. in EE from Stanford University, and served as a member of the research staff at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center for eight years. From 2001-2003, on leave from UW, he founded Intel Research Seattle, which quickly became one of the premier research labs for work in ubiquitous computing.

Gaetano’s career began in the areas of integrated circuits, circuit synthesis, reconfigurable hardware, and embedded system development tools. He transitioned into ubiquitous computing, and as director of Intel Research Seattle, he launched projects in elder care and in location-aware computing. More recently, his focus has been applying mobile technologies to the problems of public health and development in low-resource settings. His group’s open-source mobile data collection tools, Open Data Kit, are in use on six continents in programs ranging across public health, documentation of human rights violations, and environmental monitoring.

Gaetano is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE, a Fulbright Scholar, and a recipient of the UW CSE Undergraduate Teaching Award, the UW Distinguished Teaching Award, and the UW Marsha L. Landolt Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award.

Gaetano exemplifies why we are here: to provide an extraordinary educational experience for our students, in which they discover, pursue, and achieve their potential; to conduct leading-edge research, but in the context of education rather than purely for its own sake; ultimately, to make the world a better place through the impact of our teaching, research, and mentoring. He is an inspiration to all of us.

We invite you to join in honoring Gaetano by supporting the Gaetano Borriello Endowed Fellowship for Change. Contributions may be made online. For stock transfers and pledges, please contact Ed Lazowska (lazowska at cs.washington.edu).