Purdue University alumnus leads team to 2025 Misha Mahowald Prize
Kerem Y. Çamsari, alumnus of Purdue University’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has led a team to win the 2025 Misha Mahowald Prize for pioneering research in neuromorphic engineering. Çamsari, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, directed the Orchestrating Physics for Unconventional Systems (OPUS) Lab, which earned the prestigious award for its work on Stochastic Neuromorphic Computing with Probabilistic Bits.
The Misha Mahowald Prize, awarded annually, recognizes outstanding research contributions that advance neuromorphic engineering—a field inspired by the computational principles of the brain. The prize committee honored the OPUS team for implementing a novel computational architecture that integrates massive parallelism, asynchronous dynamics, and sparsity through specialized digital hardware.
According to the jury citation, the OPUS Lab’s work demonstrated practical applications in combinatorial optimization, energy-based machine learning, and quantum simulations, positioning their approach as a significant advancement in neuromorphic computing.
Çamsari earned his doctorate from Purdue ECE in 2015 under the advisement of Supriyo Datta, Thomas Duncan Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has focused his research on probabilistic computing—a computational paradigm that leverages stochastic processes to enhance efficiency in solving complex problems. The OPUS team’s innovative architecture, based on probabilistic bits (p-bits), represents a new direction in harnessing neuromorphic principles for real-world applications.
The award is named in honor of the late Misha Mahowald, a pioneering researcher in neuromorphic systems. It is presented by the Neuromorphic Engineering Institute and recognizes groundbreaking contributions that advance the field toward practical implementations.