Prof Bernard Tan and Prof Abhik Roychoudhury Honoured at University Awards 2026
The National University of Singapore (NUS) recognised nine outstanding individuals for their achievements and contributions in education, research, mentorship and service to the University, Singapore and the global community, as recipients of the annual NUS University Awards, which honour educators, researchers and professionals for exceptional contributions.
Professor Bernard Tan Cheng Yian was honoured with the Outstanding Service Award, while Professor Abhik Roychoudhury received the University Research Recognition Award.
Prof Bernard Tan Cheng Yian receives Outstanding Service Award
Prof Tan, Shaw Senior Professor with the Department of Information Systems and Analytics, has spent the past 17 years in the Office of the Provost, where he now holds the role of Senior Vice Provost (Undergraduate Education). As Chair of the University Committee on Educational Policy, his fingerprints are on curriculum reforms across nearly every college and school at NUS, including the School of Computing, and on the interdisciplinary programmes that have opened up how students across the University learn.
Closer to home, colleagues in the Department of Information Systems and Analytics know him as a scholar first. He served as President of the Association for Information Systems and sits on the editorial boards of several of the field’s leading journals, work that earned him the association’s LEO Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2024.
Asked how he approaches the scale of change he has overseen, Prof Tan has said
“All challenges come with opportunities. Let us spend more time thinking about what we can do given the opportunities rather than thinking about what we cannot do because of the challenges.”
Prof Abhik Roychoudhury receives University Research Recognition Award
Prof Roychoudhury, Provost’s Chair Professor with the Department of Computer Science, was recognised for his contributions to software testing and automated program repair.
Prof Roychoudhury’s research group at the School of Computing has spent two decades building the case that fixing software automatically depends on inferring what the programmer meant to do. That insight, first shown in his 2013 paper SemFix, went on to win the ICSE Most Influential Paper Award in 2023 and the IEEE New Directions Award in 2022, and it carried directly into AutoCodeRover, the autonomous coding agent his group developed. SonarSource acquired AutoCodeRover in 2025, and it now runs inside SonarQube, used by more than 100,000 enterprises worldwide.
The same lab pioneered greybox fuzzing research at NUS. The power schedule algorithm Prof Roychoudhury introduced is now the default in AFL++, the industry-standard fuzzing engine for security testing. Techniques from his work on directed greybox fuzzing are used in Google’s OSS-Fuzz, credited with uncovering more than 13,000 vulnerabilities across over 1,000 critical software projects.”
He was inducted as an ACM Fellow in 2024 and serves as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology.
Congratulations to both Prof Tan and Prof Roychoudhury on this recognition, richly earned across a career spent shaping how NUS teaches, and two decades of research that keeps finding its way into the software the world runs on.
