Columbia University’s Electrical Engineering 2021 Virtual Graduation Celebration and Student Awards

Awarded by the Faculty of Electrical Engineering to one outstanding graduating senior who has demonstrated outstanding passion and accomplishment in Electronics, Circuits and Physics.

Perry Flamer is a June 2021 graduate of Columbia University where he completed his B.S. in Electrical Engineering. He concurrently received a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from City University of New York - Queens College.  He is pursuing a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering as part of Columbia’s Integrated Electrical Engineering BS/MS Program.  He currently conducts research in Professor Gil Zussman’s WiMNet lab where he is studying weather effects on high frequency communication links.

Awarded by the Faculty of Electrical Engineering to one outstanding graduating senior who has demonstrated outstanding passion and accomplishment in Information and Systems.  

Natasha Dusaj

Awarded by the Faculty of Electrical Engineering to one outstanding graduating senior who has demonstrated outstanding passion and accomplishment in research. 

Angel Estigarribia graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering in April, 2021. His passion for Math and Physics led him to perform research in the field of Telecommunications at the Wireless and Mobile Networking Lab under the guidance of Professor Gil Zussman, while collaborating with engineers from Bell Labs and other institutions. He currently works at Qualcomm, developing technology in the Semiconductor industry in California.

Awarded by the Faculty of Electrical Engineering to one outstanding Electrical Engineering student who has made significant contributions to the Department and Community at large.

Tyler Patrick Riddle will complete his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and B.A. in Physics in the Summer of 2021. He has served as the Lead Electrical Engineer of Columbia's FSAE team where he focused on the design of a CAN-based vehicle control system under the guidance of Professor Mattias Preindl. He plans to continue work on the team's electric vehicle throughout the early summer and hopes to secure a job in the automotive industry.

Awarded each year by vote of the Computer Engineering faculty to an outstanding senior in the computer engineering program.

Shvetank Prakash received his B.S. degree in Computer Engineering from Columbia University in May 2021 where he was a member of the ARCADE lab under the advisement of Professor Martha Kim. His undergraduate research focused on investigating the applications of embedded ML well suited for the lab's work. He will be interning with Amazon in the summer following graduation before starting his Ph.D. at Harvard University in Fall 2021 where he will research various areas of intelligent computing systems, such as computer architecture, TinyML, and robotics.

Daniel Garces received his BS degree in computer engineering from Columbia University in April 2021. During his undergraduate career, Daniel was part of the Distributed Networks Analysis (DNA) lab under the advisement of Daniel Rubenstein, where he got the opportunity to explore ML research applied to communications. Daniel is currently working for Intel doing machine learning research and will start his PhD at Harvard in the Fall of 2021, where he will join the REACT lab under the advisement of Stephanie Gil.

This award is presented to PhD candidates who make a superb contribution to a collaborative research effort.

Ankur Nipane was a PhD student in Prof. James Teherani’s group working in the field of semiconductor device physics. In his PhD, he made significant contributions towards realizing 2D material-based electronic and photonic devices through modeling, simulation, and experiment. His collaborative effort focused on developing novel fabrication techniques for high-performance 2D devices. He successfully defended his thesis in April 2021.

Aravind Nagulu is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. He received his B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees in electrical engineering from IIT Madras, Chennai, India, in 2016. He will be joining Washington University in St. Louis, Electrical & Systems Engineering Department as an Assistant Professor in Spring 2021. His research interests lie in the intersection of integrated circuits, electromagnetics, and communication systems. In particular, he is interested in analog, RF, and millimeter-wave circuits, metamaterials, and systems with applications in next-generation communications, imaging, and quantum information processing. He has authored/co-authored papers in top-tier journals and conferences, including Nature Electronics, Nature Communications, Physical Review X, IEEE JSSC, IEEE TMTT, IEEE ISSCC, IEEE RFIC, and IEEE IMS. He was a recipient of the IEEE RFIC Symposium Best Student Paper Award (First Place) in 2018, the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Predoctoral Achievement Award 2018-2019, the ISSCC Analog Devices Outstanding Student Designer Award in 2019, the IEEE MTT-S Graduate Fellowship in 2019, and an IEEE RFIC Symposium Best Student Paper Finalist nomination in 2020.

Awarded to one outstanding Graduate student to honor the late Edwin Howard Armstrong, professor of Electrical Engineering and inventor of wideband FM broadcasting, the regenerative circuit, and other basic circuits of communications and electronics. The Armstrong Awards are sponsored by the Armstrong Memorial Research Foundation.

Mahshid Ghasemi received her B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering ( and Minor in Computer Science) from Sharif University of Technology in 2019 and her M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University in 2021. She is continuing her studies toward Ph.D. at Columbia in the areas of future wireless networks and systems, distributed edge/cloud computing, and network optimization. She is a member of the Wireless & Mobile Networking (Wim.Net) lab and is co-advised by Prof. Gil Zussman and Prof. Javad Ghaderi.

Awarded to graduate students who demonstrate outstanding performance as a Teaching Assistant.

Megan Noga is a PhD student in Prof. Ken Shepard's group studying bioelectronics. She was a Teaching Assistant in the "Digital Information Age" and "Random Signals and Noise."

Srivatsa Panduranga TAed the Analog Filters Synthesis/Design Course offered in Fall 2020. He is currently pursuing a career in Circuit Design after he graduated with MS in Electrical Engineering in Feb 2021. His focus was on the integrated circuits and systems track.

Ali Binaie is currently a PhD student in the electrical engineering department at Columbia University. He received the B.S. degree (Hons.) from Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran, in 2012, and the M.Sc. degree from the Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2014. Before joining Columbia University, he was a Researcher with the AIC Laboratory, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy, working on high-speed electro-optical transceivers. He held an Internship Position with Texas Instruments, Dallas, TX, USA, in 2020. Mr. Binaie was a recipient of the Columbia University EGSC Professional Development Scholarship Award in 2021, the Best Student Paper Award (Second Place) at the IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium (RFIC), the Jean Bennett Memorial Student Grant Award at the Optical Society (OSA) Frontiers in Optics and Laser Science (FiO+LS) Conference, and the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) Predoctoral Achievement Award in 2020. At Columbia University, He was the teaching assistant for the courses “MOS Transistors” taught by Prof. Tsividis and “Introduction to Electrical Engineering” taught by Prof. Vallancourt.

Awarded annually by the Faculty of Electrical Engineering to fewer than 5% of the candidates for the MS degree to recognize outstanding achievement.

Jiayang Zhou was an MSEE student, graduating in Feb. 2021. As a master student, Jiayang took courses in various fields, including networks, deep learning, genomics, algorithms, economics, security, ect. He also TAed a computer network course and an algorithm course with Prof. Ethan Katz-Bassett and Prof. Mihalis Yannakakis respectively. Now he starts his career in the game industry. He will focus on creating more value for the industry using the knowledge learnt, but he is also open to pursue a new degree for further study.

Johnny C. Li completed his M.S. in Electrical Engineering with a focus in Semiconductor and Devices in May 2020. He also holds a B.S. from Columbia and B.S. in Physics from Beloit College. During his time at Columbia, he TAed EE lab courses and spent most of his summers conducting studies and research with EE faculties. Johnny currently works at TSMC as a member of the standard cell R&D team and plans to pursue a doctorate in the future to explore further and make contributions in the semiconductor scene.

Sasank Garikapati is currently a second year Ph.D. track student in the Electrical Engineering Department. He received his Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India in 2019. His research interests broadly lie in the area of integrated circuits and systems with applications in wireless communication systems and sensing. He was a teaching assistant for the courses Principles of RF and Microwave Measurement, and Advanced Analog Integrated Circuits during his masters studies. He works at the Columbia high-Speed and Millimeter-wave IC (CoSMIC) lab under the guidance of Prof. Harish Krishnaswamy.

Senbiao Fang

Shiyun Yang graduated from the Master of Science in Electrical Engineering program in December 2020. During her graduate studies, she followed the Data-Driven Analysis and Computation specialization and focused on courses in the Machine Learning area. In 2019, she worked as a research assistant under the supervision of Professor Zoran Kostic and participated in the COSMOS Smart Intersection project. She also interned at Nvidia and Amazon in the following year. Her future plan is to pursue a career as a Software Development Engineer and apply the invaluable knowledge and experience she gained at Columbia to build meaningful and innovative projects.

Jingkai Yan graduated from the MS Electrical Engineering program in Spring 2020. He is on the MS/PhD track advised by Dr. John Wright, and working on on machine learning, data analysis and low-dimensional structures. In 2021 he worked on low-dimensional feature learning with neural networks, and machine learning for gravitational-wave astronomy.

Max Moeller started his higher education journey studying Applied Mathematics at Fordham University, completing his studies with a Bachelor of Arts in 2017. As part of the 3-2 Engineering Program between Columbia University and Fordham University he then transferred to the former to study Electrical Engineering. While completing his B.S. in Electrical Engineering, Max led the first effort to build an electric race car as a part of Columbia’s Formula SAE team. During his Bachelor’s degree Max decided to enroll in the integrated BS/MS (2019/2020) program, continuing his studies in Electrical Engineering. Max worked as a teaching assistant for the courses Power Systems Analysis and Signals and Systems while studying for his Master’s degree.After graduating with an B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, Max started working for Bain & Company.

Sidharth Bambah is a graduate of the Electrical Engineering MS program at Columbia University and BS program at UCLA. During his time at Columbia, he focused on the burgeoning field of Data Science and Big Data. This passion allowed him to lead teams in the development of real-time data analysis tools for high volume information. Upon graduation, Sid has focused his efforts into a career building high impact software projects with the eventual goal of leading teams to deliver economical and robust solutions for critical business problems.

Songli Wang received his B.Eng. in Optoelectronics Information Science and Engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology in 2019, and received his M.S. in Electrical Engineering with honors from Columbia University in 2021. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in the Lightwave Research Laboratory in Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, under the supervision of Professor Keren Bergman. His current research interests include photonic integrated circuit design and testing, and silicon photonic link analysis.

Liane Young is graduating from the MS Electrical Engineering program in Spring 2021 with a concentration in data-driven analysis and computation, and also completed the MS research specialization in Electrical Engineering. From Spring 2020 through Spring 2021, she worked with Dr. Ethan Katz-Bassett and Dr. Asaf Cidon to characterize network-level features of phishing attacks. After graduation, she will be working for Northrop Grumman in California.

Dickson (Richard) Yao is a student graduating from the M.S. program in electrical engineering. Under the guidance of Prof. Dion Khodagholy, his research at Columbia involved the development of organic materials for bioelectronics and neural interfaces. He will be starting his PhD in medical engineering at Caltech in the fall to continue pursuing a career in research. In 2019, Dickson graduated from the University of British Columbia with his B.A.Sc. in engineering physics.

Songli Wang