Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is celebrating two major faculty milestones this month as assistant professors Akshitha Sriraman and Tathagata Srimani receive premier national honors for their contributions to the future of computing.
Sriraman has been named the 2026 recipient of the Computing Research Association (CRA) Anita Borg Early Career Award. Meanwhile, Srimani has earned the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, a prestigious five-year grant supporting junior faculty who excel in both research and education.
Both scholars represent a significant bridge between their Indian heritage and American technical innovation. Srimani, who focuses on three-dimensional (3D) integration of computing systems, is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur.
His research addresses the “energy budget” of modern chips, where a large portion of power is wasted simply moving data between memory and processing units.
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By stacking logic and memory layers vertically, Srimani’s work aims to build faster, more energy-efficient hardware, particularly for data-heavy tasks like artificial intelligence. “By co-designing the technology and architecture together, we can fundamentally change that equation,” Srimani said.
Sriraman’s work also targets the infrastructure behind global digital life. Her research at the intersection of computer architecture and systems software focuses on making “hyperscale” data centers, the massive facilities that power the internet for billions of users, more efficient and sustainable.
A graduate of the University of Michigan with a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering, Sriraman’s innovations have already achieved real-world impact.
Her systems contributions are deployed in data centers worldwide, delivering millions of dollars in cost savings and reducing global carbon emissions. Her work has also influenced next-generation hardware designs at major tech firms, including Intel’s Alder Lake CPUs and various Infrastructure Processing Units.
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The Anita Borg award specifically recognizes Sriraman’s dual impact, her technical excellence and her commitment to broadening participation and improving experiences for underrepresented groups in computing.
“These new design frameworks will give engineers the tools to explore this vast design space efficiently,” Srimani noted regarding his own project, which also includes a mandate for training the next generation of the semiconductor workforce.
As the demand for more powerful and greener technology grows, the work of Srimani and Sriraman ensures that Carnegie Mellon remains at the forefront of the field, driven by a global perspective on engineering excellence.