Berger named a Lilly Fellow

The UMass Amherst Center for Teaching (CFT) named Assistant Professor Emery Berger as a Lilly Teaching Fellow for the 2006-2007 academic year. Lilly Fellows are selected on the basis of their promise in teaching and research, their interest in undergraduate teaching and in developing innovative teaching skills, and their potential for making a positive impact on the teaching culture in their department, college, and broader campus community.

For his Lilly project, Berger will develop a new sophomore-level computer science course entitled Principles of System Design. This course will integrate the various areas of computer systems and focus specifically on the cross-cutting concepts and principles that underpin their design. “Teaching these principles will provide students with the conceptual tools for understanding all aspects of computer systems,” says Berger. “Furthermore, treating these topics in a single course will ensure that all of our students have a solid understanding of every major computer system.” This broad scientific approach will enable students to understand and develop modern large-scale applications.

Berger joined UMass Amherst in 2002 as an Assistant Professor after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Berger’s research focuses on improving the performance and reliability of modern computer systems. His work spans programming languages, runtime systems, and operating systems, with a particular focus on memory management. Berger is the creator of Hoard, a widely-used scalable memory manager, and is part of a research group singled out by NSF site visitors as the best memory management group in the country. He leads the Programming Languages and Systems at Massachusetts (PLASMA) group and is a 2004 NSF CAREER Award recipient.

Previous Lilly Teaching Fellows in the Department include Andrew McCallum (2005-2006), Brian Levine (2003-2004), Prashant Shenoy (2001-2002), James Allan (1999-2000), Ramesh Sitaraman (1996-1997), David Mix Barrington (1994-1995), Jim Kurose (1993-1994), and Eliot Moss (1991-1992).