Prof. Yale Patt of Texas ECE has been named the recipient of the 2017 Friar Centennial Teaching Fellowship (FCTF). The Friar Society, the university’s oldest and most prestigious honor society, awards the Friar Centennial Teaching Fellowship annually to one outstanding undergraduate professor and celebrates excellence in undergraduate teaching. It is the largest undergraduate faculty award at UT Austin with an annual award of $25,000. The Friar Society was established in 1911. It is the oldest and one of the most distinguished multi-disciplinary honor societies at UT Austin. This award recognizes a faculty member who, first and foremost, has attained distinction in teaching undergraduates; and second, who embodies the Friar ideal in having made a significant contribution to the university beyond the duties of his or her calling.
As is tradition for the Friar Fellowship, the awardee is surprised with the announcement in class. Members of the Texas Longhorn Band, The Friar Society, Orange Jackets, Silver Spurs, former students, TAs, and colleagues marched into Prof. Patt's course to the tune of Texas Fight to present him with the award.
Dr. Yale Patt is a Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, and holds the Ernest Cockrell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Engineering. He also holds the title of University Distinguished Teaching Professor. Prof. Patt was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2014, among the highest professional distinctions bestowed upon an engineer. He has published more than 100 refereed papers and has won four best paper awards. His only textbook (so far) is "Intro to Computing Systems: from bits and gates to C and beyond" (co-authored with his former student Professor Sanjay Patel), published by McGraw-Hill in 2000 (2nd edition, 2004, and 3rd edition in progress), and adopted already by more than 100 universities worldwide. It revolutionizes how computing is introduced to serious freshmen.
At The University of Texas he introduced a new required freshman course, Intro to Computing (EE 306) in Fall 2000, and has taught it every other fall semester to 400+ freshmen. He also teaches his graduate specialty in Microarchitecture (EE 382N) every other spring, and the senior computer architecture course (EE 460N) whenever they let him.
He has received a number of awards for his research and teaching, most notably the highest honor in his specialty computer architecture, the 1996 IEEE/ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award, "for important contributions to instruction level parallelism and superscalar processor design," and the highest honor in computer science education, the 2000 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. Among the other awards he has received are the 1995 IEEE Emannuel R. Piore Medal, the 1999 IEEE W.W. McDowell Award,the 2005 IEEE Charles Babbage Award, the 2011 IEEE B. Ramakrishna Rau Award (inaugural recipient), "for significant contributions and inspiring leadership in the microarchitecture community with respect to teaching, mentoring, research, and service," and the 2013 IEEE Computer Society Harry H. Goode Memorial Award. At The University of Texas at Austin, he has been recognized with the Texas Exes Teaching Award for 2002, and the Dads' Association Teaching Fellowship Award for Fall 2002.