Fall 2023 Fellowships Announced

Congratulations to this years group of incoming graduate fellows. Learn more about them below. 

Tobias Zypman - Presidential Fellowship

Tobias Zypman's research interests lie in the fields of optics and photonics. For his PhD, he will be working in the Lightwave Research Laboratory under the guidance of Professor Keren Bergman. He received both my Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree and Master of Engineering degree from Princeton University. For his senior thesis, he worked on developing an optical sanitization device for public transportation systems. For his Master’s thesis, he worked on a neuromorphic computing project, where his goal was to optimize the guiding of incoherent light through a waveguide.

Manfredi Gangi - Presidential Fellowship

Manfredi is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, working under the mentorship of Prof. Matthias Preindl in the MPlab. He holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Catania, which he earned in 2020. In 2023, he completed his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Milan. During his master's studies, Manfredi actively participated in the Physis PEB team, contributing to the construction of a zero-emission hybrid-propelled catamaran. Additionally, he was an Alta Scuola Politecnica fellow in Milan, a parallel honor program for master's students, which allowed him to collaborate with Prof. Sonia Leva on second-life battery research. Manfredi also conducted his master's thesis as a Visiting Student at the MIT Senseable City Lab, focusing on the impact of thermal storage for urban development. Manfredi's roots are in Catania, Italy, where he was born and raised. His primary research interests encompass battery management, power electronics, and energy storage systems.

Alexander Ranschaert - Presidential Fellowship

Alexander (Alex) Ranschaert is a graduate student at Columbia University, currently pursuing a PhD in Electrical Engineering. He previously obtained BSc. and MSc. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Ghent University in Belgium, where he specialized in mmWave antennas and machine learning. Alex then went on to obtain a MS degree from Columbia University as a fellow of the Belgian American Educational Foundation (BAEF) in EE. Since then, has been working on an organic wireless powering system for compact neural recording devices in rodent models at the Translational NeuroElectronics Lab with Prof. Dion Khodagholy. In the future, he wishes to continue working on and improving neural interfaces by building organic, flexible integrated circuits.

Kyungmin Baek - Presidential Fellowship

Kyungmin Baek received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Seoul National University, South Korea, in 2021 and 2023, respectively. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in VLSI Lab under Professor Mingoo Seok. His research interests include analog and mixed-signal circuits designing.

Ronan McNally - Blavatnik Fellowship

Ronan McNally is an MS/PhD student in electrical engineering whose advisor is Professor Ken Shepard. His bachelor's degree was in mechanical engineering at Northeastern University. He developed an interest in the intersection between engineering and the medical field from witnessing the experiences of those close to him struggle with acute and chronic illnesses and the collective experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. This motivated himto intern at Dr. Giovanni Traverso's biomedical device lab within Harvard Medical School. He loved his time within that research environment and it taught him that there is so much exciting progress to be made within the electrical engineering field. This is what convinced him to change from mechanical to electrical engineering in his graduate program. His ambition is to research novel ways to design integrated circuits such that they can meet unique and demanding form factors. Doing this opens new avenues for medical professionals to treat patients in a less invasive, more comfortable, manner. Professor Shepard's lab excels at this and he's excited to be joining it. 

Haoyu Wang - Wei Fellowship

Haoyu Wang is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. He is now working with Prof. Matthias Preindl at the Motor Drive and Power Electronics Lab, with a main research focus on power electronics. In particular, his current research interests include high-frequency power converters, especially high-efficiency dc-dc converters, and he has a research taste towards artificial-intelligence-based design and control of power converters. He is also an experienced reviewer of top journals in the power electronics field, such as IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics and IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, etc.

Jian Teng Yan - Wei Fellowship

Nathaniel Nauman - NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Nathaniel Nauman received his B.S. in Computer Engineering (2022) and M.S. in Electrical Engineering (2023) from Purdue University with minors in Math and Arabic. He is an NSF GRFP Fellow and a recipient of the State Department’s Critical Language Scholarship for Bengali. At Purdue, his research included developing probabilistic computing architectures on FPGA for p-bit accelerators under his advisor Professor Supriyo Datta. Currently, Nathaniel is pursuing his PhD at Columbia University in Professor Keren Bergman’s Lightwave Research Laboratory with interests in quantum optics and photonic integrated circuit design.

Adrian Florea - NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Adrian Florea is from Mount Prospect IL which is just a 30 minute drive away from Chicago. He received his bachelors in Mechanical Engineering at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee where he conducted research in surgical robotics and ingestible biomedical devices. 

He is currently a MS/PhD student under Professor Xiaofan (Fred) Jiang and is co-advised by Professor Nima Mesgarani. His work is related to signals, information, and embedded systems where he aims to study hardware and software systems that measure and process noise and acoustic modalities with the broad goal of improving how we monitor and treat respiratory, cardiac, gastrointestinal, and neural diseases. 

Kevin Hermstein - Evergreen Fellowship

Kevin Hermstein received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering (Cum Laude) from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2023. He was the recipient of the Presidential, George Corcoran Memorial and Jean M. and Everett L. Dillard scholarships. His research interests include wireless networks, digital signal processing and machine learning. He is advised by Professor Gil Zussman and works with the Wireless and Mobile Networking Lab (WiMNet).

Marwan Eladl - French Fellowship

Marwan Eladl is an electrical engineering graduate student at Columbia University. He recently graduated from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign with a BS and MS in electrical engineering. There he worked on 2D material based novel electronic and magnetic devices.  He strives to explore new forms of computing using new material systems whether they be semiconducting or biological. His current research with Professor Kenneth Shepard involves combining biological and electronic systems, expanding the capabilities of diagnostic, therapeutic, and computation devices. If you do not find him in the lab he is probably cooking, at the gym, or making a new spotify playlist with his amazing and supportive partner and love of his life. 

Priyanka Dilip - French Fellowship

Priyanka Dilip is a first-year doctoral student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, working in Professor Keren Bergman’s Lightwave Research Laboratory. Her research interests are in optoelectronic integrated circuitry for data processing/transfer in large systems. Prior to joining Columbia, Priyanka received an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2023, as a Fellow of the U.S. Department of Energy HEPIC Traineeship. She received a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University in 2021. Her past research experiences were at national labs (FNAL: Fermi National Accelerator, PPPL: Princeton Plasma Physics), university labs (Cornell-CAC, -CEI, -SSDS), and in industry (Lockheed Martin-Sikorsky, Intel). These projects spanned the semiconductor engineering stack: from sensing/readout chip design and plasma nanosynthesis, to autonomous flight and accelerated computing. As a CU Science Honors Program-alumna from her high school days, Priyanka is most excited to have rejoined her “first alma mater”!

Shiyu Wang - Chiang Chen Fellowship

Shiyu works with Prof. John Wright. Her research interests are high dimensional data analysis, machine learning for science, and the innovation of energy-efficient deep learning architectures. She received a B.Eng. in Electronic Information Engineering from Xidian University, and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University.

Evelyn Ferwalt - Higgins Fellowship and Provost Diversity Fellowship

Evelyn Ferwalt (she/her) is an incoming MS/PhD track candidate in the Lightwave Research Lab with Professor Keren Bergman, where she will research active integrated photonics toward co-packaged electro-optic integration. Evelyn received her B.S. from the University of Rochester, where she did photonics research in the lab of Professor Jaime Cardenas. She also did a summer internship at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Group 89: Quantum Information and Integrated Nanosystems, where she lead a team to winning first place in an intern project pitch competition called I³C. She is especially interested in the intersection of optical and electrical systems engineering.

John Louis Drogo - Byron Fellowship

John is a first year PhD student working in the WiMNet lab studying under Professor Gil Zussman. He received a B.S. dual major in Computer Systems Engineering and Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2016 (Summa Cum Laude) and a M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2020 (with Honors). Prior to Columbia he worked as a radar systems engineer at SRC, Inc., specializing in DSP chains for on the move radar/counter-UAS, and as a software tech-lead in the Google Cloud Security team focusing on analysis systems for regulated controls. His research interests include data analytics, distributed computing, software defined radio, digital processing chains, complex signal analysis, and radar backends.

Joshua Williams - Amazon MS Fellowship

Joshua Williams is a graduate student for Electrical Engineering looking to pursue education in Smart Electric Energy and Machine Learning. He's interested in doing research with the Columbia University Formula SAE program. His faculty advisor is Matthias Priendl.

Jessica Marshall - Dean's MS Academic Excellence Fellowship

Jessica is an incoming MS student in the Department of Electrical Engineering. She previously received a BS in biology from Louisiana State University and conducted research in endocrine oncology at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Working on novel therapeutic strategies for cancer inspired her to explore the intersection of living and engineered systems. By specializing in neuroengineering, she hopes to create technological solutions that empower individuals with knowledge of their bodies and support them in creating personalized approaches for health and wellbeing.