Each year, the College of Engineering at MSU gives awards to distinguished alumni who have brought honor to the college through their exceptional achievements. Nominations are made by faculty, alumni, and other supporters of the department. The awards are presented at a banquet each spring during commencement weekend. This year, the award was given to Jianchang (JC) Mao. Mao currently serves as Vice President and the head of Advertising Sciences in Yahoo Labs. He is responsible for the R&D of advertising technologies and products, including sponsored search, contextual advertising, display advertising, user targeting, and categorization. Prior to joining Yahoo Labs, Mao was Director of Emerging Technologies & Principal Architect at Verity Inc., a leader in enterprise search (acquired by Autonomy), from 2000 to 2004. Prior to this, he was a research staff member at the IBM Almaden Research Center. Mao's research interest includes machine learning, data mining, information retrieval, online advertising, social networks, pattern recognition, and image processing. He received an Honorable Mention Award in ACM KDD Cup 2002, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks Outstanding Paper Award in 1996, and Honorable Mention Award from the International Pattern Recognition Society in 1993. Dr. Mao served as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks. Congratulations, JC!