About a week or so ago Bruce Maggs, SIGCOMM’s awards chair, kindly informed me over the phone that my dissertation on coflows has been selected for the 2015 ACM SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award. The committee for the award included Ratul Mahajan, Dina Papagiannaki, Laurent Vanbever (chair), and Minlan Yu, and the citation reads:

Chowdhury’s dissertation provides novel and application-aware networking abstractions which significantly improve the performance of networked applications running in the cloud.

It’s a great honor to join some great researchers who’ve won this award before me.

It goes without saying that this achievement wouldn’t have been possible without my great advisor Ion Stoica keeping me on course, my excellent collaborators over the years, and many others who paved my way in multiple ways. I am also grateful to some of my biggest supporters: Randy Katz, Mike Franklin, Srikanth Kandula, and Vyas Sekar. An equal amount of credit, if not more, goes to my family and friends, who cheered me on and supported me for so many years. I don’t say it often enough: thank you!