Anand D. Sarwate, a professor in the School of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, recently received a Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence. The prestigious award recognizes Sarwate’s achievements as one of the university’s most outstanding young faculty members.
“Receiving this award is a great honor and was a total surprise since I didn’t know I’d been nominated,” Sarwate says. “It makes me feel like I’ve been doing something of value to Rutgers, instead of just to my subspecialty, and that it’s supporting the sum total of my efforts.”
Sarwate, who has been promoted to associate professor effective July 1, joined the School of Engineering faculty in January 2014. He is a 2015 recipient of the prestigious National Science Foundation Early Career Development Award (CAREER) for his research on privacy-preserving learning for distributed data that uses practical algorithms to bridge the gap between the theoretical and actual preservation of privacy.
His ongoing research interests include privacy-preserving data analysis, machine learning and statistics, information theory, and distributed optimization and signal processing.
According to Sarwate, the financial support from the fellowship will help him and the students whose research he supervises in the coming academic year. “Perhaps construed more broadly, a recognition like this helps me remember that research is a long-term endeavor, so that I can focus on projects which may be slow to get off the ground, but which will ultimately make an impact,” he explains.
With this award, Sarwate joins a select group of Rutgers University faculty members distinguished by their exceptional scholarly contributions and achievements. “While I’m doing the research work because it interests me, this award makes me feel connected to the rest of the University,” Sarwate adds.