Pictured left to right: Yinzhe Yu (Academic Excellence Fellowship), Jian Liu (Honeywell Fellowship), Monica LaPoint (John Deere Fellowship), and Srivatsan Varadarajan (Guidant Fellowship).
Pictured left to right: Yinzhe Yu (Academic Excellence Fellowship), Jian Liu (Honeywell Fellowship), Monica LaPoint (John Deere Fellowship), and Srivatsan Varadarajan (Guidant Fellowship).
The graduate program in Computer and Information Science has a number of new and existing fellowships sponsored by industry and fellowships from the Graduate School. The Guidant Foundation has generously established a yearly fellowship for one of our graduate students. For 2002-03, the third year of this award, the recipient is Srivatsan Varadarajan, a PhD student who will complete his dissertation by the end of summer 2003. Varadarajan works with Jaideep Srivastava and Zhi-Li Zhang in multimedia and networked systems on Quality of Service in different applications.
Last spring Honeywell, a supportive member of our Computer Science Affiliates, funded four 25% fellowships. These are awarded to PhD students who are deep into their research to encourage them to finish soon. The awardees were Jian Liu, Sunghee Kim, Raja Harinath and Xiuzhen Cheng.
The John Deere Foundation sponsored another new fellowship earmarked as a minority fellowship. Monica Anderson LaPoint, who is returning to school after a number of years in industry to pursue her PhD with an interest in Robotics, received this award. She also received one of our Academic Excellence Fellowships, funded by a block grant from the Graduate School. Other recipients of this Academic Excellence Fellowships for 2002-03 are Michael Janssen, [name withheld], and Yinzhe Yu. These fellowships are designed to encourage new students who have demonstrated academic excellence to pursue their PhDs.
The block grant from the Graduate School provides the Department some additional fellowships. Our summer fellowship recipients include Jian Liu who recently defended his thesis, and Yingfei Dong and Amy Larson who will both defend at the end of the spring semester. In addition we have granted Excellence in Research awards to four students who have each presented a paper at a prestigious conference. The four awardees last year were Brian Bailey, John Eberhard, Baek-Young Choi and Uygar Oztekin.
Amy Larson and Yingfei Dong
We are also fortunate to have Mihaela Cardei receive a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship awarded by the Graduate School. These fellowships are for students who are doing cutting-edge research and who will be completing their dissertation by the end of the year. The Graduate School also awards Graduate School Fellowships to excellent new graduate students for their first year. Our two recipients this year are Adam Matz and Dan O'Brien, both PhD students with great potential.
These fellowships offer important support to our graduate students by allowing them to devote their time to their research and thus hastening their graduation. The generosity of these groups and foundations are key to our continued accomplishments and successful PhD program.
-Georganne Tolaas