Cornell postdoc Justin Hsu has been awarded the SIGPLAN John C. Reynolds Dissertation Award for his thesis "Probabilistic Couplings for Probabilistic Reasoning." David Menendez also received an award.
Justin received his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was advised by Benjamin Pierce and Aaron Roth. At Cornell he is jointly hosted by Nate Foster, Bobby Kleinberg, and Dexter Kozen on their NSF AiTF-funded project, "Theory and Practice of Probabilistic Network Programming." He will start a tenure-track job at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in September.
For more info on award: http://www.sigplan.org/Awards/Dissertation/