Tirthak Patel, an assistant professor of computer science at Rice University, has been awarded a 2025 IEEE Early Career Researcher Award for Excellence in High Performance Computing. The award recognizes individuals who have made outstanding and potentially long-lasting contributions to high-performance computing (HPC) within five years of earning their doctorate. He is one of three recipients of the award from the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Community on High Performance Computing (TCHPC).
Patel was formally recognized during the Supercomputing 2025 (SC25) conference in St. Louis in November.
Patel directs Rice’s Positive Technology Lab, where his group develops solutions to advance the practical usability of quantum-classical computing, with a strong emphasis on open-source tools and reproducibility. His team designs compilers, optimization frameworks, and datasets that improve the accessibility and performance of HPC systems while ensuring broad impact across the computing community.
Before joining Rice, Patel received his PhD in Computer Engineering from Northeastern University. His research has been recognized with several major distinctions, including the ACM/IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship, the NSERC Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship (CGS D), and Best Paper Finalist honors at the Supercomputing (SC) and ICCAD conferences. His PhD dissertation received honorable mentions from ACM SIGHPC and IEEE SPEC.
At Rice, Patel’s excellence as a mentor has been recognized with the Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award and the Career Champion Award for his commitment to student success. His mentees have won first place at ACM Student Research Competitions and earned national fellowships and other distinctions.
In addition to his research and teaching, he actively serves on program committees for leading computing conferences, including SC, ISCA, MICRO, HPCA, SIGMETRICS, and ICS.
The IEEE TCHPC Early Career Researcher Award highlights Patel’s leadership in HPC and recognizes him as one of the field’s most promising contributors. More information about the award and past recipients is available on the TCHPC website.