2022 Student Fellowships and Awards

September 14, 2022

We are extremely proud to announce that a number of Electrical Engineering graduate students in our program have been selected to receive Columbia fellowships. We are so excited to have such a talented group of students in our program and wish everyone the best of luck in their endeavors!

Blavatnik Fellowship

Gift of Sir Leonard Blavatnik ’81 to fund incoming doctoral fellows focused on health- and medically-oriented engineering research.

EVAN BATTAGLIA

EVAN BATTAGLIA

Evan will be joining the Columbia University Department of Electrical Engineering in Fall 2022 as an M.S./Ph.D. student. He previously received a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Delaware, where he conducted research at the Functional Additive Manufacturing Laboratory on devices for chemical sensing. The devices he developed there include a 3D-printed grenade-launchable quadcopter drone for the detection of chemical weapons and a mechanism for the automation of colorimetric sensor tubes. His other research interests include embedded processing and mixed-signal electronics. At Columbia, Evan will be working under Dr. Kenneth Shepard on technologies that merge cutting edge integrated circuit techniques with novel applications in medicine and biology.

 


Presidential Fellowship

These fellowships are awarded annually to selected incoming Ph.D., Eng. Sc.D., and master’s/Ph.D. students.

LEONARDO FELIPE TOSO

leonardo

Leonardo is a first year Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University where he is currently working with Professor James Anderson. His research interests are polynomial optimization, system level synthesis, federated learning and nonlinear control theory. Prior to joining Columbia University, he was an undergraduate research intern in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, from April to November of 2021. Leonardo was awarded his MSc in Control, Signal and Image Processing from the University of Paris-Saclay and the MEng in Control Engineering from CentraleSupélec, both in France. He also received his BSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Campinas (Unicamp), in Brazil.

MARITZA CORREA

Correa description.

MINGHUI (SCOTT) ZHAO

mz

Scott (Minghui) Zhao is an incoming PhD student working at Columbia Intelligent and Connected Systems Lab (ICSL) supervised by Prof. Fred Jiang. His research interest is in building intelligent and low-cost indoor drones that bring ubiquitous sensing and actuation to a smarter daily environment. Before his PhD, Scott earned his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from UC San Diego and master's degree in Computer Engineering at Columbia University. Before joining Columbia, he published a paper in UbiComp/IMWUT as a first author on low-power and high-accuracy Ultra-Wideband (UWB) 3D localization.


Evergreen Fellowship

JAMES VENDITTO

 

JAMES

Research Professor: Prof. Keren Bergman 

Lab: Lightwave Research Laboratory

Research Interests: Optoelectronic Devices and Materials for applications in sustainability, computing, and sensing.

Previous Degree: B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame (2022), with a concentration in Semiconductors and Nanotechnology

Other Relevant Academic Achievements: graduated magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame


French Fellowship 

Bequest of Ralph S. French '42CC

BERK ADIM

ADIM

Berk got his BSc degree in Electrical Engineering from Bilkent University in Ankara. He has worked on high-accuracy OPAMP design, wideband RF switch design, and narrowband high-power LNA design during his undergraduate studies with the guidance of Prof. Atalar. He loves all things analog and wants to get his foot in the door of the IC design world. At Columbia, he is excited to start working in the Bioelectronics Lab with Prof. Shepard and his group.

NISHANT PATIL

NISHANT

Nishant Patil is a doctoral fellow at the electrical engineering department of The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. He works with Professor Harish Krishnaswamy at the Columbia high-Speed and Millimeter-wave IC (CoSMIC) lab. His research interests include RF and mm-wave circuits, Full duplex systems. He did his bachelor's and master's at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India. In 2022, he was awarded the best institute hardware project for his master's thesis on NB-IoT receiver design.


Byron Fellowship 

Bequest of Verna and Oscar Byron 1914

MAX HAIMOWITZ

max

Max Haimowitz is a first-year graduate student working in Professor Keren Bergman’s Lightwave Research Laboratory. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. As an undergraduate he was a member of the Eta Kappa Nu (IEEE-HKN) electrical engineering honor society and worked on research into optical resonators in Professor Amir Arbabi’s photonics lab.


ALEXANDRE MSELLATI

ALEX

Alexandre is a PhD student supervised by Matthias Preindl for his research at MPLAB. He focuses mainly on electric motors and power electronics, tackling both design and control, for applications in the automotive field. He earned a Mechanical Engineering master's degree in propulsion systems at Centrale Nantes, a top French engineering school, before coming to Columbia to pursue his MS in Electrical Engineering, as a Tesla Scholar. His major interests lie in the automotive propulsion, both conventional and electric.


HIGGINS FELLOWSHIP

DUNCAN WISNIEWSKI

DUNCAN

Duncan is a PhD student in the Translational Neuroelectronics Lab studying under Professor Dion
Khodagholy. He has previously earned a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Wireless engineering as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Auburn University. He most recently received a Master of Electrical Engineering degree from Columbia while researching soft and conformable bioelectronics. Currently he is researching applications and design of Organic electrochemical transistors(OECT). In the Translational Neuroelectronics Lab he designs, fabricates, and tests new designs for transistors in pursuit of highly conformable and effective designs for implantable electronics used in animal models.


Wei Fellowship

XILIN JIANG

Xilin

Xilin Jiang received B.S. with the highest honor in computer engineering from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign(UIUC). He interned twice as an SDE intern at Amazon before coming to Columbia. His undergraduate research focuses on audio/speech processing and machine learning. He is interested in source separation and audio representation learning in particular. He will continue his research in Neural Acoustic Processing Lab led by Professor Nima Mesgarani.


Dean’s MS Academic Excellence

MING LIU

ming

Ming Liu is an incoming Electrical Engineering master’s student at Columbia University. He graduated cum laude from the University of California, San Diego with a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, and has previously conducted data-driven climate research with the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego. Ming’s current research interests are in applied machine learning, and his graduate academic advisor is Professor Asaf Cidon.


Dean’s MS Academic Excellence

BENJAMIN DRILLINGS

BEN DRILLINGS

Benjamin Drillings is a first year Electrical Engineering Master’s student at Columbia working in research at the MPLab with supervision from Dr. Matthias Preindl. He is currently a member of the Columbia FSAE team and is looking to follow the Smart Electric Energy master’s concentration in hopes of pursuing his interest in control systems and power electronics. Benjamin previously graduated cum laude from SUNY New Paltz in May of 2022 where he received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering.


Amazon MS Fellowship

CARLOS CRUZ

Carlos is a Mexican immigrant student who recently graduated from Stony Brook University with B.E. in Electrical Engineering. He is currently pursuing his M.S. in Electrical Engineering at Columbia University where he is specializing in integrated circuits. He was recently awarded the 2022 Amazon Master of Science (MS) Fellowship and the Nikola Tesla Electrical Engineering Scholar at Columbia University. His theoretical skills have also been put into practice in two internships. The first one was at Ricoh USA Inc. as a customer engineer and the second one was at ChemCubed as an electrical engineer. He is interested in integrated circuits, digital circuits, embedded systems, and printed circuit board design.