Wei Family Private Foundation 2019–2020 Scholarship Winners

On November 22, Janet Chen, Edward Chen and John Donnelly, representatives of the Wei Family Private Foundation, visited the Department of Electrical Engineering to present its 2019-2020 scholarship awards. The nonprofit foundation was established to honor the memory of Dr. Chung Kwai Lui Wei, the first woman to receive a PhD in physics from Oregon State University, and Mr. Hsin Hsu Wei, who received his MS in electrical engineering from Columbia. The foundation awards scholarship grants for up to three years to students of Chinese heritage with high academic credentials who are pursuing a degree in science or mathematics at Oregon State University or a graduate degree in electrical engineering at Columbia University.

Receiving a scholarship for the second time was Jingkai Yan. Two other students, Min Yee Teh and Zhaowen Wang,received scholarships for their third and final year.

Yan is a second-year PhD student, working under the supervision of Professor John Wright. He received his BEng in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2018. His research interests include non-convex optimization, signal processing, and theoretical machine-learning algorithms.

Teh is a fourth-year PhD student, working under the supervision of Professor Keren Bergman in the Lightwave Research Laboratory. Born and raised in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, he received his BS in electrical engineering from Brown University in 2016. His research focuses on the modeling and simulation of optical interconnects in high-performance computing systems.

Wang is a third-year PhD student, working in Professor Peter Kinget’s group in the Columbia Integrated Systems Laboratory. He received his BEng in electronics and information engineering from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, in 2017. From 2016 to 2017, he was an undergraduate research assistant in Professor Asad Abidi’s lab at UCLA. His research focuses on complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) radio-frequency design and high-speed analog integrated circuits design.

Two students who previously received scholarships for three years also attended the event. They were Tingjun Chen and Zhewei Jiang.

The department is grateful to the Wei Family Private Foundation for its continued support of the electrical engineering graduate program.

Visit the EE Flickr page for more photos.

— By Eliese Lissner