David J. Kuck Outstanding Thesis Awards

These awards were established by alumni, former students, and friends in recognition of Professor Kuck's intellectual and leadership contributions. Each year, two awards are given: one for an outstanding doctoral thesis and one for an outstanding master's thesis.

Kuck was professor of computer science from 1965-1993. In 1977, he developed the Parafrase compiler system, which is used as a test bed for the development of many new ideas on vectorization and program transformation. He led the construction of Cedar in 1985, a 32-processor SMP supercomputer built at Illinois. He was founder of Kuck and Associates and won numerous awards, including the Eckert-Mauchly Award from ACM/IEEE, the IEEE Computer Society's Computer Pioneer Award, the Charles Babbage Outstanding Scientist Award, and the Illinois Computer Science Distinguished Educator Award. In 2015, Kuck was inducted into the College of Engineering Hall of Fame.

David J. Kuck Outstanding PhD Thesis Award

2022: Apostolos Kokolis 

2021: Dimitrios Skarlatos
2020: Faraz Faghri 
2019: Shadi A. Noghabi
2018: Matthew Sinclair
2017: Andrei Anescu
2016: Milos Gligoric
2015: John Criswell
2014: Siva Kumar S. Hari
2013: Joshua Hailpern
2012: Robert L. Bocchino Jr.
2011: Abhinav Bhatele
2010: Deng Cai
2009: Daniel Dig
2008: Luis Ceze
2007: Koushik Sen
2006: Sameer Kumar
2005: Nathan A. Carr
2004: Ting Yu
2003: Alper Ungor
2002: Xiangmin M. Jiao
2001: Raghupathy Sivakumar
2000: Ari Trachtenberg
1999: Sergio Servetto
1998: David Koufaty
1997: Kent E. Seamons
1996: Peichen Pan

David J. Kuck Outstanding MS Thesis Award

2023: Yuheng Zhang
2022: Qi Zeng 
2022: Yuheng Zhang 
2021: Chaoqi Yang
2020: Joon Sung Park
2019: Unnat Jain
2018: Dimitrios Skarlatos
2017: Xiang Ren
2016: Le Xu
2015: Cosmin Rădoi
2014: Wenxuan Zhou
2013: Shin Hwei Tan
2012: Pooja Agarwal
2011: Zhijun Yin
2010: Rajhans Samdani
2009: Abhinav Bhatele
2008: Dafna Shahaf
2007: Chao Liu, Thadpong Pongthawornkamol
2006: Radu Teodorescu
2005: Smruti Ranjan Sarangi
2004: Not Awarded
2003: Svetlana Lazebnik
2002: Vanish Talwar
2001: Xiaohui Gu
2000: Gang Zou
1999: Tae-Eun Kim
1998: Ragupathy Sivakumar
1997: Daniel M. Gaines
1996: Michael Chin-Ming Fu