“Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)”

The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering learned on July 23, 2012 that Professor A. Kevin Tang received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.

The Presidential early career awards embody the high priority the Obama Administration places on producing outstanding scientists and engineers to advance the National goals, tackle grand challenges, and contribute to the American economy. Sixteen Federal departments and agencies join together annually to nominate the most meritorious scientists and engineers whose early accomplishments show the greatest promise for assuring America's preeminence in science and engineering and contributing to the awarding agencies' missions.

Professor Tang joined ECE at Cornell in Fall of 2007 as an assistant professor.  Tang received his B.E. from Tsinghua University, Beijing in 1999 and an M.E. from Tsinghua University, Beijing in 2001.  In 2002 he received his M.S. from California Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in 2006 also from California Institute of Technology.  Tang is broadly interested in control and optimization of engineering networks such as the Internet and power grids. Special attention is given to obtaining compact global understanding, providing predictions that can be quantitatively compared with experimental data, and designing scalable distributed algorithms.