January 15, 2025
Distinguished Professor Mohit Bansal was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The PECASE is the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government to outstanding scientists and engineers who are in the early stages of their independent research careers and who show exceptional promise for leadership in science and technology.
Established in 1996, the award “recognizes innovative and far-reaching developments in science and technology, expands awareness of careers in science and engineering, recognizes the scientific missions of participating agencies, enhances connections between research and impacts on society, and highlights the importance of science and technology for our nation’s future.”
Bansal is the John R. and Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and director of the Multimodal Understanding, Reasoning, and Generation for Language Lab (MURGe-Lab) within the UNC Natural Language Processing Group. His research expertise is in natural language processing and multimodal machine learning, with a particular focus on multimodal generative models, grounded and embodied semantics, faithful language generation, and interpretable, efficient, and generalizable deep learning.
Since joining the Department of Computer Science in 2016, Bansal has received numerous awards from government, academia, and industry, including the National Science Foundation Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award and Director’s Fellowship, Army Young Investigator Award (YIP), Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur Young Alumnus Award, Google Focused Research Award, and Microsoft Investigator Fellowship. His research has received outstanding paper awards at conferences on computational linguistics, computer vision, natural language learning, and more.
Prior to joining UNC-Chapel Hill, he spent three years as a research assistant professor at the Toyota Technical Institute in Chicago. He received a doctorate in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Bansal is one of two PECASE recipients currently in the Department of Computer Science, joining Distinguished Professor Ron Alterovitz, who was recognized in 2019.
The announcement of Bansal’s award was made Tuesday in a White House press release. He was nominated for the PECASE by the Army Research Office (ARO), and in 2021 he received the ARO’s Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (ECASE-Army), offered to PECASE recipients as a “bridge” due to announcement delays.