On July 9th 2026, the UC Tech community honored outstanding individuals and teams from across the UC system with the 2026 UC Tech Awards at the UC Tech Annual Conference. The awards recognize exceptional achievements in artificial intelligence, innovation, design, information security, operational excellence, collaboration, and sustained impact. They highlight the many ways technology advances UC’s mission of teaching, research, patient care and public service.
This year’s nominees demonstrate the depth and diversity of UC’s technology community. From strengthening cybersecurity and modernizing operations to expanding the use of AI and improving the experiences of students, faculty, staff, patients and researchers, these projects and individuals exemplify the creativity, collaboration and expertise that drive innovation across the university. Their work reflects UC Tech’s longstanding commitment to sharing knowledge, fostering connections and reimagining what’s possible through technology.
Congratulations to the 2026 Tech Award Winners!
Congratulations to the 2026 UC Tech Award winners and nominees! This year’s submissions illustrate how the UC technology community continues to tackle complex challenges, embrace emerging technologies and build solutions that create lasting value across the university. Together, these individuals and teams represent the collaborative spirit, ingenuity and service mindset that make UC a leader in higher education technology.
Throughout the coming months, UC Tech News will feature a series of blogs spotlighting each UC Tech Awards winner. View the blog to hear reflections and experiences directly from the teams and individuals whose innovative work is advancing UC’s mission.
Larry L. Sautter Award for Innovation in Information Technology
Gold Award: ZotGPT Team – UC Irvine: ZotGPT is UC Irvine’s innovation engine — a free, secure AI ecosystem that has reshaped how students learn, staff work, and researchers discover. In two years, it grew from a single tool into a campuswide force for transformation, reaching 30,000+ community members across every school, department, and mission area.
Silver Award: Future Farm Now Team – UC Riverside: FutureFarmNow is a free, bilingual web and iPhone platform from UC Riverside. It combines satellite, soil, crop, water, weather, and advisory data into one statewide tool for practical farm decisions.
Design Award
Gold Award: Campo Seguro Project Team – UC Davis Health: Campo Seguro is the first-ever multilingual website designed with and for farmworkers. Available in six languages, it provides accessible information for farmworkers to learn about common safety hazards and their workplace rights.
Silver Award: UC San Diego Library Digital Experience Team – UC San Diego: The UC San Diego Library Digital Experience (DX) Team built a user-centered, inclusive design practice from the ground up, achieving full WCAG 2.0 Level AA compliance in July 2024 and sustaining Quality Assurance (QA) and accessibility scores above the industry benchmark for three consecutive years for the core Library public website. This library-wide organizational change initiative included multiple firsts for the Library: a new student design team, a web governance framework focused on accessibility, a documented inclusive design process, and quarterly participatory design events to engage directly with library user communities.
Mojgan A. Amini Operational Excellence Award
Gold Award: ITS Continuous Improvement Team – UC San Diego: Process improvement efforts at ITS were fragmented, difficult to measure, and largely invisible. We implemented an integrated framework that standardizes service ownership, embeds process improvement into daily operations, and enables measurable, enterprise-wide impact.
Silver Award: UCSD Health Enterprise Automation Team: UC San Diego Health: Two automated systems replaced manual workforce safety workflows at UCSD Health, delivering continuous exposure notification and compliance tracking across 18,000+ employees.
IT Security Award
Gold Award: President CyberSecurity Requirements Implementation: Enforcement Phase Team – UC Riverside: Securing the Mission: How UCR Transformed the 2025 Cybersecurity Mandate into a Technical Reality. Bridging leadership support—including Chancellor letters and Provost videos—with specialized IT teams, UCR implemented automated, real-time access controls validating device health and training before application access. This effort engaged professors and staff to reach nearly 100% compliance without interrupting the academic mission. Crucially, this success now serves as the foundational framework for supporting and scaling future security initiatives across the university.
Silver Award: Secure UCSB Switch Replacement Team – UC Santa Barbara: Unified 400+ buildings into a secure network to meet UC-wide device tracking and security mandates and set the stage for a broad-scale modernization of UCSB’s network service.
Silver Award: UCSF Cybersecurity eDiscovery Team – UC San Francisco: Using an AI coding agent, created a web app to serve as an eDiscovery case management solution to enable tracking, auditing, and automation of eDiscovery processes and cases.
Yvonne Tevis UC Collaboration Award
Gold Award: UC SHAPE (Sexual Violence and Harassment Prevention & Education) Team – UC Office of the President: Delivering secure, systemwide compliance training to over 300,000 UC students annually through a unified, UC-owned platform that improves access, efficiency, and data security.
Silver Award: UCSF–UCLA Point-of-Care Randomization (POCR) Collaboration Team – UC San Francisco / UCLA: UCSF created a first-of-its-kind EHR-based randomization engine, enabling real-time randomized trials within clinical workflows across UC health systems.
AI Impact Award
Gold Award: ScholarConnect Team – UC Irvine: ScholarConnect elevates UC Irvine’s research visibility with AI that turns CVs into searchable faculty profiles.
Silver Award: UCSF APeX Enabled Research (AER) & Health IT Platform for Advanced Computing (HIPAC) Collaboration Team – UC San Francisco: AER and HIPAC created a first-of-its-kind, governed pathway to embed, evaluate, and scale AI models directly within the EHR, enabling real-world clinical impact at UCSF.
Sustained Impact Award
Gold Award: Erik Wieland – UC San Francisco: Gold is presented to Erik Wieland for 29 years of leadership, mentorship, and service that have strengthened technology, collaboration, and inclusion at the university.
Silver Award: Judy Thai – UC Office of the President: Silver is presented to Judy Thai for leading systemwide initiatives that strengthened digital accessibility and fostered a culture of inclusion.
All 46 2026 UC Tech Award Nominees Listed by Location
UC Agriculture and Natural Resources (ANR)
- Operational Excellence: 4H Waivers Rapid Development Team
UC Berkeley
- IT Security: MSSEI Requirement Finder Core Team
UC Davis
- Innovation: Administrative Innovation and Technology, RAM Project Team
- Operational Excellence: UC Davis IET Staff Advisory Committee
- Design: Campo Seguro Project Team (2026 Winner)
- AI Impact: Rocky in Canvas Team
UC Davis Health
- Innovation: IT Unified Communications Network Engineering and IT Security
UC Irvine
- AI Impact: Calvin Belmonte
- AI Impact: ScholarConnect Team (2026 Winner)
- Innovation: Team ZotGPT (2026 Winner)
UC Merced
- Operational Excellence: Koffi Apedoh
- Innovation: Jessica Duffy, Alisha Kimble, Rachel Leigh Bellofatto, Corinne Townsend, Richard Lee, Chris Speckens, James Cha, Srikanth Maringanti, Patty Zhang, Kashyap Shah, Jason Frisch
UC Office of the President
- Sustained Impact: Justin Sabo
- AI Impact: UCPath Improves Self-Service and PathPal Project Teams
- IT Security: HCM Data Services – Information Security Committee (ISC)
- AI Impact: Syed Mehdi
- AI Impact: UC Investments AI Implementation Team
- Sustained Impact: Judy Thai (2026 Winner)
- Collaboration: UC IT Procurement – Campus and System Wide for Atlassian
UC Riverside
- AI Impact: Haofei Zhang, Kora Dey
- IT Security: President CyberSecurity Requirements Implementation Team: Enforcement Phase (2026 Winner)
- Collaboration: Campus Support Services
- Innovation: Future Farm Now (2026 Winner)
- UC SHAPE (Sexual Violence and Harassment Prevention & Education) Team (2026 Winner)
UC San Diego
- Design: UC San Diego Library Digital Experience Team (2026 Winner)
- Operational Excellence: ITS Continuous Improvement (2026 Winner)
UC San Diego Health
- Operational Excellence: UCSDH MarComm WebOps and DX teams
- Operational Excellence: UCSD Health Enterprise Automation Team (2026 Winner)
UC Santa Barbara
- IT Security: Secure UCSB Switch Replacement Team (2026 Winner)
- Innovation: FinHub Financial Reporting Team
- Innovation: Elda Schaffield
- Operational Excellence: UCSB’s AWS Lift-and-Shift Project Team
UC Santa Cruz
- AI Impact: The AI Purchase Copilot Team (UCSC)
UCLA
- Operational Excellence: Edmund Leung
- Innovation: CLA Digital Spaces Team, DTS
UCSF
- IT Security: UCSF Cybersecurity eDiscovery Team (2026 Winner)
- Innovation: Digital Accessibility Compliance Project
- Operational Excellence: UCSF Enterprise Digital and Web Solutions – Remediate PDF Team
- Sustained Impact: Erik Wieland (2026 Winner)
- Innovation: CJ Frosch, Christopher David, Bonnie Ankle, Paris Jefferson, Esther Lejano, Geneva Velez, Jeff Williams
- Design: UCSF SCUBA Metadata Assistant team
- AI Impact: William Santo
- Collaboration: UCSF–UCLA Point-of-Care Randomization (POCR) Collaboration Team (2026 Winner)
UCSF Health
- Operational Excellence: UCSF Replacement Worker Operations Team
- AI Impact: UCSF APeX Enabled Research (AER) & Health IT Platform for Advanced Computing (HIPAC) Collaboration (2026 Winner)
