Student and Alumni

Meet the 2025 Graduate Award Winners

EE  announces its 2025 Graduate Awards, recognizing outstanding student achievement in research, teaching, and service across MS and PhD programs.

By
Xintian Tina Wang
May 13, 2025
ee

The Columbia Electrical Engineering Department is proud to announce the recipients of the 2025 Graduate Awards, recognizing exceptional students who have demonstrated academic excellence, innovative research, impactful teaching, and dedicated service to the department and broader community. This year's awardees reflect the depth and breadth of talent across our graduate programs.

Eli Jury Award

Recognizing achievement in systems, communications, signal processing, or circuits. 

  • Jeremy Johnston – PhD student with Prof. Xiaodong Wang, researching optimization and machine-learning techniques for wireless and quantum sensing systems.
     
  • Jingping Nie – PhD student with Prof. Fred Jiang. Her thesis, Embedded AI and Sensing for Wellness, Health and Sustainability, explores AI/ML for healthcare and sustainability. She will join UNC’s School of Data Science as Assistant Professor.

Edwin Howard Armstrong Memorial Award

Presented to an outstanding MS degree candidate in communications and electronics.

  • Kevin Hermstein – MS/PhD student with Prof. Gil Zussman, focusing on wireless networks and software-defined radio.

Electrical Engineering Collaborative Research Award

Honoring PhD students who demonstrate excellence in collaborative research.

  • Youssef Amr Fahmy – PhD student with Prof. Matthias Preindl, recognized for research and prototyping in DC charger development.
     
  • Han Wang – PhD graduate with Prof. James Anderson, now at ByteDance, recognized for work on federated reinforcement learning.

Master of Science Award of Excellence

Awarded to fewer than 5% of MS graduates for exceptional academic achievement.

  • Harsh Benahalkar, Danyang Cheng, Sukru Samet Dindar, Yoseph Hamad, Lars Fischer, Abhilash Praveen Kumar, Yunlong Li, Vasileios Panousopoulos, Zichen Qian, Yuan Qing, and Flor Paul Els Sanders.

MS Research Award

Recognizing outstanding research achievement among graduating MS students.

  • Amelia Kwak – Researcher in Prof. Zussman’s group, Dean’s MS Academic Excellence Fellow, and Tesla Scholar.
     
  • Ian Li – Lead author on edge-computing VLM research with Prof. Zoran Kostic; now a PhD student in EE.
     
  • Ilgar Mammadov – Computer Engineering MS student in Prof. Ethan Katz-Bassett’s group, led research on DNS and content delivery performance.

Jacob Millman Award – For Outstanding Teaching Assistants

Honoring exceptional contributions in teaching support.

  • Berk Adim – TA for VLSI Design Lab under Prof. Ken Shepard.
     
  • Carson Garland – Four-semester TA for Computer Networking with Prof. Katz-Bassett.
     
  • Minghui Zhao – TA for IoT Systems with Prof. Fred Jiang; updated lab content to include LLMs.

Graduate Service Award

Recognizing significant service contributions to the department and community.

  • Bernard Steyaert – PhD student with Prof. Matthias Preindl, GEEC President, TA, and departmental ambassador.

Electrical Engineering MS Teaching Award

Awarded to graduate students who demonstrate excellent performance in teaching.

  • Yuechen He – Contributed to developing labs for ELEN E4312 using the new MOSbius chip.
     
  • Tingyao Wang – Helped overhaul Classical and Quantum Information Theory course materials.
     
  • Yingrui Wei – Demonstrated deep commitment to teaching and curriculum development for ELEN 4312.