André van der Hoek, chair of the Department of Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences and head of the Software Design & Collaboration Laboratory, has been awarded three grants totaling more than $1 million. Two of them – one from the National Science Foundation and the other from Microsoft’s Software Engineering Innovation Foundation – support his research and development of cloud-based sketching tools for use by designers and architects on electronic whiteboards and tablets. The third grant, also from the NSF, is for collaborative software development research, and van der Hoek will share it with fellow UCI informatics professor David Redmiles and faculty at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.