By the Office of Engineering Communications
The School of Engineering and Applied Science has recognized six assistant professors, including Parastoo Abtahi and Alex Lombardi, for outstanding teaching and research. Each recipient of the 2026 junior faculty awards will receive $50,000 to support their work.
Abtahi received the Howard B. Wentz, Jr. Junior Faculty Award. She is an expert in human-computer interaction with a specialty in augmented and virtual reality and spatial computing. Her group designs and builds devices that can extend human abilities and intelligence in the physical world. Szymon Rusinkiewicz, chair of computer science, called Abtahi a “star researcher in the field of human-computer interaction” and said her work has “created important intellectual and cultural shifts for the students in our department.” Abtahi was recognized with the 2025 ACM Conference User Interface Systems and Technology Best Paper Award. Abtahi has also made an impact as a teacher, leading several independent work seminars on augmented reality, which have been “met with great enthusiasm and have struck a chord among many Princeton undergraduates,” Rusinkiewicz said. Abtahi completed a Ph.D. at Stanford University and was a visiting research scientist at Meta Reality Labs Research in Toronto. She joined the Princeton faculty in 2023.
Lombardi received the E. Lawrence Keyes, Jr./Emerson Electric Co. Faculty Advancement Award. His research focuses on the theory and foundations of classical and quantum cryptography. Cryptography and codebreaking were foundational to computer science and predate the founding of the discipline. Lombardi’s work focuses on a relatively new frontier in cryptography — how quantum computers change cryptographic capabilities. Lombardi is developing approaches to post-quantum computing to ensure security, primarily by providing proofs of identity and validity, rather than encoding messages and data. Szymon Rusinkiewicz, chair of computer science, said Lombardi “offers truly unique, complementary, and invaluable expertise in terms of his applications of theory to the important and ever-changing field of cryptography.” Lombardi is also an accomplished teacher, and a graduate seminar he led on cryptographic proof systems earned a commendation for outstanding teaching from the engineering school in fall 2025. Lombardi earned his Ph.D. from MIT and spent a year as a Simons-Berkeley postdoctoral fellow at the University of California-Berkeley. He joined Princeton in 2023.