Three Columbia Electrical Engineering affiliates have received National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships (GRFP), one of the nation’s most competitive honors for early-career researchers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics: Arnaud Lamy, (EE BS’25); Rahul Thomas, a first-year PhD student; and Roland Yin, an incoming PhD student.
The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program supports outstanding graduate students pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in STEM fields. Established in 1952, the program aims to strengthen the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States by recognizing individuals who demonstrate the potential to make significant contributions to research, innovation, and education.
Lamy completed his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering at Columbia Engineering in May 2025, graduating magna cum laude with a minor in Computer Science. He also received the Electrical Engineering Department’s Student Excellence Award in Information and Systems. During his time at Columbia, he served as a teaching assistant for Signals and Systems Lab, Fundamentals of Computer Systems, Digital Signal Processing, and Random Signals and Noise. As an undergraduate researcher in Professor John Wright’s group, Lamy worked on algorithms for manifold denoising. His research culminated in two papers, including one accepted at the International Conference on Machine Learning. His academic interests spanned signal processing, machine learning, and communication theory, and he credits his willingness to follow wide-ranging intellectual curiosities with leading him toward his current research path. Lamy is now pursuing a PhD in Quantum Information Theory at UC San Diego as a Centaur Fellow.
Thomas is a first-year Electrical Engineering PhD student co-advised by Professor Micah Goldblum and Professor Adam Block. He received the NSF fellowship for his work on private and efficient large language model inference. As an undergraduate, Thomas developed reconstruction attacks on three statistically private LLM inference schemes and proposed a defense protocol, work that resulted in a first-author publication at the International Conference on Machine Learning. More recently, he presented first-author work at the International Conference on Learning Representations, where he developed a rejection sampling algorithm designed to improve decoding speeds in large models without degrading output quality.
Roland Yin is an incoming PhD student in Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from UC Santa Barbara, graduating with highest honors. His undergraduate research focused on structure-property relationships in inorganic and quantum materials, ranging from the energy-efficient microwave synthesis of sodium-ion battery cathodes to the study of superconducting kagome metals with potential relevance to quantum computing.
His recent work examined how electron-electron interactions drive charge-density-wave order and unconventional superconductivity in kagome alloys, with the goal of leveraging their intrinsic Josephson features for quantum sensing applications, including high-sensitivity RF detection. At Columbia, Yin will join Professor Keren Bergman’s Lightwave Research Laboratory, where he will study integrated silicon photonics.
