2025 Archimedes Dinner Recognizes New Endowed Professors and Donors

Columbia Engineering hosted the 2025 Archimedes Dinner and Lecture on Nov. 13, honoring faculty members who have recently received endowed professorships, along with their respective donors. Eight faculty members were recognized in a ceremony in Low Library, which included the annual Archimedes Lecture, given by Steven Feiner, Wang Family Professor of Computer Science. 

Dean of Columbia Engineering and Electrical Engineering Professor, Shih-Fu Chang, who MC’d the event, greeted guests and articulated the importance of faculty support. 

“Endowed professorships are a crucial part of our mission,” said Dean Chang. “They enable our faculty to continue the critical research that will have a lasting impact on society. From healthcare and climate to artificial intelligence and computational science, the named professorship supports groundbreaking research being done at Columbia Engineering that translates into major real-world impact.”     

Acting President of Columbia University Claire Shipman also spoke to attendees and acknowledged University Trustee Fermi Wang (EE MS’89, EE PhD’91), who endowed the Wang Family Professorship, and Columbia Engineering Alumni Association President Reid Ellison BS’08, for their efforts on behalf of the Engineering School. She praised how the School is “leading the way” in research breakthroughs and how the night’s honored professors are “building a foundation for the kind of long-term, big-picture thinking that advances human knowledge in thrilling and unexpected ways.”

Two Electrical Engineering faculty members were honored at the event:

Gil Zussman

Kenneth Brayer Professor of Electrical Engineering 
(Donor: Kenneth Brayer MS’65)

Gil Zussman received the BSc degree in industrial engineering and management and the BA degree in economics (both summa cum laude) from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 1995. He received the MSc degree (summa cum laude) in operations research from Tel-Aviv University in 1999 and a PhD degree in electrical engineering from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 2004. Between 1995 and 1998, he served as an engineer in the Israel Defense Forces. Between 2004 and 2007, he was a postdoctoral associate at MIT.

Since 2007, he has been with Columbia University, where he is now Kenneth Brayer Professor of Electrical Engineering, chair of the electrical engineering department, professor (affiliated) of computer science, and member of the Data Science Institute. His research interests are in the area of networking, and in particular in the areas of wireless, mobile, and resilient networks. He has been the Columbia PI of the ~$18M NSF COSMOS testbed, which is a national wireless infrastructure that is being deployed in West Harlem and enables experimentation in wireless and optical networks, edge cloud computing, and smart cities. The testbed has served as a foundation for the NSF Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3) Engineering Research Center (ERC) at Columbia.

Zussman is an IEEE Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters. He was an associate editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, and IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and the Technical Program Committee (TPC) co-chair of IEEE INFOCOM’23, ACM MobiHoc’15, and IFIP Performance 2011. He received the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) Award for distinguished students, two Marie Curie International Fellowships, the Fulbright Fellowship, the DTRA Young Investigator Award, and the NSF CAREER Award and is a co-recipient of eight best paper awards.

Vishal Misra

RKS Family Professor of Computer Science; Professor of Electrical Engineering
(Donor: Richard Song BS’92)

Vishal Misra serves as the vice dean for computing and AI in the School of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering at Columbia University. He is an ACM and IEEE Fellow, and his research emphasis is on mathematical modeling of systems, bridging the gap between practice and analysis. As a graduate student, he co-founded CricInfo, which was acquired by ESPN in 2007. In 2021, he developed one of the world’s first commercial applications built on top of gpt3 for ESPNCricinfo and has been subsequently modeling the behavior of LLMs. He also played an active part in the Net Neutrality regulation process in India, where his definition of Net Neutrality was adopted by both the citizen’s movement and the regulators. He has been awarded a Distinguished Alumnus Award by IIT Bombay (2019) and a Distinguished Young Alumnus Award by UMass-Amherst College of Engineering (2014).

He received a BTech from IIT Bombay in 1992, and an MS and PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1996 and 2000, respectively.

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