Meet the Recipients of the 2026 ECE Alumni Awards
The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is proud of its leaders, engineers and technological innovators. Each year, its students, faculty and alumni nominate graduates who have made a significant impact academically or professionally and brought distinction to themselves and the University of California, Davis.
The 2026 awards honor an up-and-coming leader in intelligent systems and an esteemed researcher in digital and analog circuit design. Qilian “Vision” Yu, Ph.D. '18, has received the ECE Rising Star Award, and Borivoje Nikolic, Ph.D. '99, the ECE Distinguished Alumnus Award.
“Yu and Nikolic are outstanding researchers and innovators, pushing academia and industry forward,” said Saif Islam, chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “They are shining examples of the impact our students have and the incredible things they are capable of.”
ECE Rising Star Award: Qilian “Vision” Yu, Ph.D. '18
Shortly after graduating from UC Davis, Qilian Yu joined American video game company EA as an AI scientist. He was tasked with expanding the company’s content delivery system to enable personalized play experiences across multiple game titles.
Before his three-year anniversary, the company promoted Yu to the title of senior AI scientist. In this leadership role, he led the design of the Reco Platform, which serves as the core architecture for EA’s AI-driven personalization tools. He also drove the development of scalable and production-ready machine learning solutions across the company and championed out-of-the-box AI solutions for EA’s player-facing applications.
Yu is now a technical director with EA. He drives innovation in recommendation, matchmaking, anti-cheat, content generation, churn prevention and other high-impact AI and machine learning services that shape the experiences of millions of players worldwide.
ECE Distinguished Alumni Award: Borivoje Nikolic, Ph.D. '99
Borivoje Nikolic, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley, is a decorated researcher advancing digital and integrated circuit design, VLSI, and signal processing algorithms.
Across his career, Nikolic’s research has been cited nearly 30,000 times, earning him an outstanding h-index of 60. He is also the lead inventor or co-inventor on five patents and is the co-author of Digital Integrated Circuits: A Design Perspective.
In 2003, he received an NSF CAREER award, following his receipt of the Anil K. Jain Prize for the Best Doctoral Dissertation in Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC Davis in 1999. He has also received numerous Best Paper honors at preeminent conferences, including the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference and the ACE/IEEE International Symposium of Low-Power Electronics.
Nikolic was the Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society from 2014 to 2015 and was the technical program chair for the 2022 Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits. In 2024, he was the symposium’s general chair.
He is a faculty director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center and a member of the SpeciaLIzed Computing Ecosystems, or SLICE, lab at UC Berkeley.
Yu and Nikolic will be formally recognized by the department during ECExpo 2026 on April 3 at UC Davis.
