UC Tech Awards Program - 2026

Congratulations to the 2026 Tech Award winners!

Read more about the awards:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.