“Professor Remzi has shaped not only my thesis but the way I think about systems research. Remzi is co-author of Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces, a textbook that has taught operating systems to hundreds of thousands of students worldwide. Working with him was the single most formative experience of my undergraduate career. What makes Remzi exceptional as a mentor is how he guided me from the very beginning. When I was still figuring out what “pod startup latency” even meant and how to measure it, he sent me key research papers that showed me what rigorous container measurement looks like and where the field’s open questions were. He helped me understand what success would look like for this project and gave me a framework for isolating and measuring each stage of the pod lifecycle. That early guidance shaped every decision I made afterwards: building a two-surface measurement pipeline, discovering and eliminating three silent measurement bugs, and running a same-environment replication that confirmed my model’s slope within 0.1%. None of that would exist without his willingness to invest time pointing me in the right direction before I even knew the right questions to ask. Remzi’s influence extends beyond technical guidance. He made time for a senior thesis student even while running a major research group, and held me to the same standards he holds his PhD students. I leave this thesis with a durable sense of what serious systems research looks like. Remzi gave me that, and I cannot think of a more deserving recipient of this award.”