CS Professor Sarita Adve Honored with ACM SIGARCH Alan D. Berenbaum Distinguished Service Award

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor Sarita Adve has received the ACM SIGARCH Alan D. Berenbaum Distinguished Service Award, one of the highest honors recognizing service to the computer architecture community. Presented annually at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), Adve received the 2026 award for “sustained and transformative contributions to ACM SIGARCH, the broader architecture community and, via CARES, the ACM SIG ecosystem.”

"SIGARCH established the award in 2008, and its first recipient was Alan D. Berenbaum, a longtime SIGARCH leader and former SIGARCH chair. After his death in 2016, the award was renamed in his honor. A connection meaningful to me: Alan’s sister, May Berenbaum, is a renowned professor of entomology at the University of Illinois, so the name on this award resonates with our campus community."

The Alan D. Berenbaum Distinguished Service Award is based on nominations and four to seven letters of support from members of the computer architecture community. Receiving the recognition, Adve said, affirms years of work dedicated to strengthening the computer architecture community.

"It's among the highest forms of recognition for service in my field, and it means a great deal to me," Adve said. "Research awards reward discoveries; this one specifically honors the work of building and sustaining a community — the mentoring, organizing, governance, and culture-building that often happen quietly behind the scenes."

Throughout her career, Adve has helped launch initiatives that promote a more inclusive and supportive computing community, including proposing SIGARCH's caregiver travel grant program, co-leading the creation of CARES (the Committee to Aid Reporting on discrimination and harassment policy violations), elevating Women in Computer Architecture (WiCArch) to an official SIGARCH subcommittee and enabling the Computer Architecture Today blog.

"Alongside this, I've contributed to the broader computing community through service with organizations such as the National Science Foundation, DARPA ISAT, the Computing Research Association, the ACM Council and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. To have this body of work recognized with an award named after Alan Berenbaum, who embodied service to this community, is profoundly meaningful."

Despite the individual recognition, Adve emphasized that the accomplishments were the result of many collaborators.

"Deeply honored, and genuinely humbled — but more than anything, my feeling is one of gratitude, because the work this award recognizes was the work of many colleagues," Adve said.

Adve said the recognition belongs to everyone who helped build those initiatives.

"So, while I'm honored to accept this recognition, I accept it on behalf of everyone who built these efforts alongside me. My strongest feeling is pride in them and deep gratitude — to those colleagues and collaborators, to my nominator and supporters and to a community that was willing to change."

Adve specifically recognized the SIGARCH Executive Committee that served during her tenure as SIGARCH Chair from 2015-19.

"I want to explicitly acknowledge the SIGARCH Executive Committee during my time as Chair. We restructured the committee so that each member took on a substantial portfolio of activities for the community and every one of them worked tremendously hard to deliver. I'm proud to have led such an effective and committed group but the credit for what we accomplished belongs to them."

Adve added that many of SIGARCH's most visible initiatives from that time were successful because committee members took ownership of them.

"The initiatives people now associate with that period — the communications and the Computer Architecture Today blog, the mentoring and visioning efforts, WiCArch — happened because individual committee members owned them and saw them through."

Adve singled out CARES, which has become a model for other organizations.

"CARES deserves a special word. It was the culmination of a joint effort by a core group — Kim Hazelwood, Natalie Enright Jerger, Margaret Martonosi, Kathryn McKinley and myself — who each led different parts of the process that led to its formation. The SIGARCH Executive Committee played a key supporting role in the painstaking task of communicating with ACM leadership and drafting the committee's charge and many members of the broader community lent their support as well."

Adve hopes the recognition will continue to amplify efforts to build more welcoming research communities.

"I see recognition like this less as a culmination than as an amplifier," Adve said. "The CARES model has already spread well beyond computer architecture — many ACM SIGs have adopted similar committees, an ACM-level effort took ownership of the broader program and the CARES movement received the Computing Research Association's 2020 Distinguished Service Award."

"I am especially proud that with the active support and efforts of our head, Nancy Amato, Illinois has also embraced the model by establishing its own CARES committee within the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, and the College of Engineering is also adopting this model," Adve said.

Reflecting on the award, Adve credited the mentors and colleagues who shaped her career especially Mary Jane Irwin.

"Among them, Mary Jane Irwin stands out, in part because she had no connection to me of the usual kind — she wasn't my advisor, my collaborator or a colleague at my institution. What she did for me and for so many other women in computing was pure service, given freely and expecting nothing in return."

Irwin's advice, Adve said, became a guiding principle throughout her own career.

"When I asked her how I could possibly pay her back, she always told me the same thing: pay it forward. That has stayed with me, and much of my own service has been an attempt to honor that advice."

Adve hopes that the message resonates with the next generation of researchers.

"So my closing thought is really an extension of hers, especially for students and early-career researchers: contributing to a field isn't only about publications. The health of a research community depends on people willing to do the organizing, mentoring and service work that holds it together — and that work is worth doing even when it's hard and largely invisible. The best way to repay the people who lift you up is to lift up others in turn."

Adve also expressed appreciation to those who made the recognition possible.

"I'm grateful to the Siebel School and the University of Illinois for supporting this work, to my nominator and supporters and to everyone who has been part of these efforts. Awards like this one ultimately belong to the whole community that made the change possible."

In her acceptance speech, Adve dedicated the award to Mary Jane Irwin and described in more detail the process and the people who contributed to the work that led to this recognition.