Department leadership awarded four awards honoring individuals who have made significant contributions to their fields of expertise, demonstrated outstanding personal accomplishments or shown exceptional service to the department and the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering.
Adam Bates, Ph.D.
Distinguished Alumni Award for Academic Excellence
Bates was recognized for his outstanding contributions to computer science, specifically the areas of intrusion-detection systems, digital privacy and threat detection. His research confronts issues of security, privacy and transparency in a broad range of computer systems and applications.
Bates is an associate professor at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his doctorate from UF in 2016 under the guidance of Professor Kevin Butler, Ph.D. His thesis was “Designing and Leveraging Trustworthy Provenance-Aware Systems.”
At UF, he was a founding graduate student at the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity (FICS) Research.
He is the chief technical officer and co-founder of Provenance Security. Among Bates’ accomplishments are the 2023 USENIX Noteworthy Reviewer Award, the 2023 IEEE Security & Privacy Distinguished Paper Award and the 2022 ESORICS Best Paper Award.
Subodha Charles, Ph.D.
Distinguished Alumni Award for Entrepreneurship
Charles was recognized for his notable contributions in hardware security and trust, embedded systems and computer architecture. He is the co-founder and chairman of Pearl Cluster, a group of companies working in construction, software, digital marketing and healthcare.
Charles is a senior lecturer at the Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. He received his doctorate in computer science from UF in 2020.
Charles’ many awards include first prize in the IEEE Empowering a Billion Lives Competition in the Control, Automation and Cyber-Physical Systems track. He was recognized in 2024 as one of Computing’s Top 30 Early Career Professionals by the IEEE Computer Society.
Farimah Farahmandi, Ph.D.
Distinguished Young Alumni Award
Farahmandi was recognized for her outstanding contributions in hardware-security verification, formal methods, fault-injection attack analysis and post-silicon validation and debug. She is the Walden C. Rhines Endowed Professor for Hardware Security in UF’s Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. She is also the associate director of the Florida Institute of Cybersecurity (FICS) Research.
Farahmandi received her doctorate from UF in computer and information science and engineering in 2018.
Among her many accolades are the 2025 Pramod Khargonekar Junior Faculty Award for Excellence, the 2024 Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering Excellence Award for Assistant Professors, the 2024 Design Automation Conference Under-40 Innovators Award and the Yangbin Wang Rising Star Endowment in 2023.
This year, she was also named one of UF’s 40 Under 40 alumni.
For her project, “SAIF: Security Assurance through AI and Formal Approaches for System-on-Chips,” Farahmandi received funding through the NSF CAREER program in 2024. Beyond her research, Farahmandi serves as an associate editor of “IET Computers & Digital Techniques” and participates in the technical and organizing committees of leading IEEE and ACM conferences.
Aaron Kotranza, Ph.D.
Distinguished Alumni Award for Entrepreneurship
Kotranza was recognized for his impact on health education, artificial intelligence and software engineering. He is the chief technology officer and co-founder of Jacaranda Tech and was a co-founder and former chief technology officer of Shadow Health, which was acquired by Elsevier Nursing Education.
Kotranza is a double Gator, having received his bachelor’s degree in computer engineering in 2005 and his doctorate in computer engineering in 2009.
In his current role at Jacaranda Tech, Kotranza expands upon his decades of experience building innovative education solutions that use virtual reality technology, working with machine learning and AI technology. Jacaranda Tech provides automated decision tools for use with admissions, scholarships, awards and talent acquisition for corporations.
Kotranza co-founded Shadow Health in 2011 and served for three years as senior director of software engineering after its 2021 acquisition by Elsevier.
Ying Xuan, Ph.D.
Distinguished Alumni Award for Career Achievement
Xuan was recognized for his outstanding contributions in artificial intelligence. His extensive experience in industry builds upon his UF research in social network analysis and optimization, wireless security system design and network infrastructure vulnerability assessment.
Xuan received his doctorate from UF in 2011.
Xuan is currently the director of AI for the feed and content ecosystem at LinkedIn, where he leads a global team of 60 AI engineers who are responsible for LinkedIn’s homepage feed ranking, unconnected content recommendations and creator ecosystem optimization. His team builds cutting-edge recommendation systems and LLM solutions to provide content to more than 12 billion LinkedIn members.
Xuan joined LinkedIn in 2014 and served in a variety of roles, including senior software engineer for machine learning and senior manager for machine learning.
Before joining LinkedIn, he served as a software engineer at eBay and IBM.