The Distinguished Alumni Award is the highest honor Caltech bestows on its graduates, and four more Techers joined its ranks this month: Leonidas Guibas (BS ’71, MS ’71), Eddy W. Hartenstein (MS ’74), Shouleh Nikzad (MS ’84, PhD ’90), and David Van Essen (BS ’67). They bring the total number of recipients to more than 280 since the award was established in 1966.
The 2026 class spans computer science, satellite communications, space and medical instrumentation, and neuroscience.
Leonidas Guibas (BS ’71, MS ’71) is the Paul Pigott Professor of Engineering at Stanford and a principal scientist at Google DeepMind. He helped found the field of computational geometry, co-developed red-black trees with Robert Sedgewick, and now works on 3D deep learning. He has 580 publications and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Eddy W. Hartenstein (MS ’74) served as the founding president of DIRECTV and brought direct-to-home digital satellite TV to consumers. He later served as CEO and publisher of the Los Angeles Times and as president and CEO of Tribune Media. He sits on the board of Sirius XM, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and received a Lifetime Achievement Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Shouleh Nikzad (MS ’84, PhD ’90) is chief technologist at JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA. Her delta-doped and superlattice-doped silicon detectors solved a 50-year challenge in UV imaging, and her work has translated NASA sensor technology into tools for tumor delineation and neurosurgery. She holds more than 20 patents and was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering. The International Astronomical Union named Asteroid (540413) Nikzad in her honor.
David Van Essen (BS ’67) is the Alumni Endowed Professor of Neuroscience at Washington University School of Medicine. His research established the brain as a unified, interconnected system, and his computational tools reshaped neuroanatomy and neuroimaging. He led the Human Connectome Project and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.