At a gathering Monday evening, the Stanford Alumni Association will present the 2024 Richard W. Lyman Award to Mehran Sahami for “outstanding Stanford citizenship across the university.” Sahami is the Tencent Chair of the Computer Science Department, the James and Ellenor Chesebrough Professor, and a senior fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. 

Each year, SAA recognizes one outstanding faculty member who generously donates time to alumni and embodies the association’s mission to foster a lifelong intellectual and emotional connection between the university and its graduates. 

Mehran Sahami’s research focuses on engineering, computer science, artificial intelligence, and technological ethics. Before joining the Stanford faculty, he worked as a senior research scientist at Google. At Stanford, he teaches two of the university’s largest classes, and data show that 75% of computer science undergraduates have taken a class taught by Sahami. 

Sahami served as co-chair of the ACM/IEEE-CS joint task force on Computer Science Curricula, which created curricular guidelines for college programs in computer science at an international level. Most recently, he worked with others to develop Code in Place, a free, human-centered, intro-to-coding course. In one month, the course enabled more than 10,000 students in 120 countries to learn computer programming from 90 volunteer teachers.

For more than 15 years, Mehran has engaged with the alumni in a variety of ways, from leading classes at Reunion Homecoming and Sierra Camp to logging thousands of miles to speak with alumni groups around the world. 

In the citation honoring Sahami, SAA said his passion for education is one of the many reasons he is so beloved by the Stanford alumni community. 

“No matter the subject matter – computer science, the ethics of Big Tech or beyond – Mehran’s unwavering generosity in sharing his scholarship with fellow alumni is a treasure that we deeply appreciate, said Howard Wolf, vice president for alumni affairs.

“We are fortunate to have Mehran as part of our alumni learning community, and we proudly celebrate this well-deserved recognition.”