Michael Bender, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University, received the 2014-2015 SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching (EIT).

The Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence provide recognition in five categories: Faculty Service, Librarianship, Professional Service, Scholarship and Creative Activities, and Teaching. The EIT award recognizes “consistently superior teaching at the undergraduate, graduate” level that is in line with SUNY’s “commitment to providing students with instruction of the highest quality”. The awards acknowledge superior professional achievement and encourage the continuous pursuit of excellence, according to SUNY’s website.

Bender said that upon receiving the award he felt fantastic and grateful.

“I enjoy teaching Stony Brook students. It's a different sort of thrill, depending on whether I'm teaching a large or small class and whether I'm teaching freshmen or advanced graduate students, but I enjoy it all,” Bender said.

Bender works in theoretical computer science and specializes in teaching the more mathematical courses, he said. His research is in algorithms with a focus on big data.

Bender, along with Martín Farach-Colton and Bradley Kuszmaul, co-founded the database company, Tokutek which was recently acquired by Percona.

“I'm also the joint head of the Computer Science Honors program, which means that I've had the pleasure of teaching some of the most hardworking, most enthusiastic, and talented undergraduates,” Bender said.

“Dr. Bender is a superb faculty member as evidenced in his relationships with faculty and students, and his leadership of the Computer Science Honors program. This recognition is very well-deserved,” said Arie Kaufman, Chair and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook.

On October 6, 2015, Bender will formally receive the award and medallion at the Annual SUNY Chancellor’s Awards dinner.

Bender is an associate professor of computer science at the Stony Brook University. His research interests include parallel computing, scheduling, data structures, and I/O-efficient computing on large data sets. He has held Visiting Scientist positions at MIT and King's College London. Bender has coauthored over 100 articles. He was a member of the Sandia team that won the CPA R&D 100 Award for scheduling in parallel computers. He has also won four awards for graduate and undergraduate teaching. Bender received his B.A. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in 1992 and obtained a D.E.A. in Computer Science from the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon, France in 1993. He earned a PhD on Scheduling Algorithms from Harvard University in 1998.