Faculty Recruiting Support CICS

2021 OAA Award Recipient Biographies

Kavya Krishna
Computing for the Common Good

Kavya Krishna is a co-founder of the Society of Women Coders (SOWCoders), a women-led organization that works to encourage young girls from developing nations to opt for education and careers in STEM, by conducting free coding and entrepreneurship camps, and providing mentorship. She also works as a senior analyst at SiriusXM in New York City.

Kavya is an advocate of women’s education and financial freedom, and regularly speaks about women's issues and social impact in the developing world. Through SOWCoders, she has worked with government agencies and civic organizations in Haiti, Kenya, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Belize and 22 other countries to establish coding camps, and has personally taught at several of them. Over the past year, she’s been able to impact over 800 girls virtually. Previously, she worked for the Naya Savera Foundation in Jaipur, India as a tutor for children living with HIV.

Krishna received a bachelor’s in computer science from the College of Information and Computer Sciences, UMass Amherst in 2016.

Harpreet Sawhney​
Outstanding Achievement in Technical Development

Harpreet Sawhney is a principal computer vision architect for 3-D vision, visual learning and mixed reality at Microsoft HoloLens.

He previously served as CTO of vision technologies at SRI International in Princeton, NJ, where he directed vision and learning research for numerous defense and commercial applications, and at IBM, where he led the pioneering QBIC (Query by Image Content) system for video indexing.

Sawhney has published over 110 technical papers in computer vision journals and conferences, and is listed on over 85 US patents. He was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 2012 and SRI Fellow in 2011 for his contributions to computer vision. He obtained his doctorate in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1992.

Robert Sproull
Outstanding Support for the College

Bob Sproull is an adjunct professor of computer science at the College of Information and Computer Sciences, UMass Amherst, and the inaugural chair of the college's advisory board. Sproull founded the Dean’s Opportunity Fund for diversity initiatives and scholarships, and has provided significant support for other CICS scholarship opportunities.

Previously, Sproull served as vice president and director of Oracle Labs. Sproull is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, where he has served as chair of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. He is on the Amherst College Council and is a trustee of the Connecticut River Conservancy. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received a master’s degree and doctorate in computer science from Stanford University and an AB in physics from Harvard College.

Lee Delaney
Outstanding Achievement in Management

Lee Delaney is president, chief executive officer, and director of BJ’s Wholesale Club. Prior to joining BJ’s, Lee was a partner in the Boston office of Bain & Company from 1996–2016. While at Bain, Lee led the Americas Consumer Products Practice, advising clients on a broad range of topics including strategy, mergers and acquisitions, and cost reduction.

Before joining Bain, he led consulting engagements for Electronic Data Systems and Deloitte Consulting. Delaney is a member of the board of directors of PDC Brands Inc. He earned an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University, and a bachelor’s from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with majors in computer science and math.

Brendan Burns

Brendan Burns
Outstanding Achievement in Research

Brendan Burns is a co-founder of the Kubernetes open source project and corporate vice president in Microsoft Azure. He currently leads teams that focus on DevOps, infrastructure as code, containers, and open source projects including the Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Resource Manager, Azure Portal, Linux, and SAP on Azure. Previously, he was a distinguished engineer and director of engineering in Azure Compute. Before joining Microsoft, he worked as a senior staff software engineer for Google Cloud and the Google web search infrastructure.

Burns has also taught computer science, robotics, and studio art as an assistant professor at Union College in New York. He is the co-author of several books, including Kubernetes Up and Running, Kubernetes Best Practices and Designing Distributed Systems.