Meet the 2026 Graduate Award Winners

Columbia Engineering’s Department of Electrical Engineering honored its 2026 graduate award winners, recognizing students whose work spans biomedical imaging, quantum networks, AI systems, photonics, control theory, brain-computer interfaces, power electronics and more.

The annual awards celebrate graduate students across the department for excellence in research, teaching, service and scholarship. This year’s recipients include master’s students, doctoral candidates and student ambassadors whose contributions reflect the breadth and impact of Columbia EE’s graduate community.

• Eli Jury Award

Established in 1991, this award is presented to a graduate student or recent graduate for outstanding achievement in the areas of systems, communications, signal processing, or circuits.

Shiva Letchumanan, a PhD student supervised by Professor Ken Shepard, received the Eli Jury Award for outstanding research achievement in circuits and systems. Letchumanan began at Columbia Engineering as an MS/PhD student in fall 2018 and completed his thesis defense in October 2025. His research focuses on wearable ultrasound imagers as a step toward point-of-care therapies.

• Edwin Howard Armstrong Memorial Award

Awarded to one outstanding candidate for the MS degree to honor the late Edwin Howard Armstrong, professor of Electrical Engineering and inventor of wideband FM broadcasting, the regenerative circuit, and other basic circuits of communications and electronics. The Armstrong Awards are sponsored by the Armstrong Memorial Research Foundation.

Yuesheng Ma, a first-year PhD student working with Professor Nima Mesgarani, received the Edwin Howard Armstrong Memorial Award. Ma’s research focuses on speech neuroscience and brain-computer interface technology.

• Electrical Engineering Collaborative Research Award

This award is presented to PhD candidates who make a superb contribution to a collaborative research effort.

Jeremy Johnston received the Electrical Engineering Collaborative Research Award for his exceptional contribution to a collaborative research effort. Johnston was a PhD student supervised by Professor Xiaodong Wang and began as an MS/PhD student in fall 2019. He earned his PhD in October 2025 and is now a postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Electrical Engineering.

• Jacob Millman Award

Awarded to graduate students who demonstrate outstanding performance as a Teaching Assistant.

William Ho, is currently a PhD student under the supervision of Professor Zoran Kostic and  was recognized for his teaching contributions across several deep learning courses, including Neural Networks and Deep Learning, Advanced Deep Learning and Deep Learning on the Edge.

Alon Levin, a fifth-year PhD student working with Professor Gil Zussman, was honored for his teaching and course assistant work in Intro to Electrical Engineering, Digital Information Age and Computer Networks. His research focuses on full-duplex wireless and software-defined radio.

• Graduate Service Award

Awarded by the Faculty of Electrical Engineering to an Electrical Engineering graduate student who has made significant contributions to the Department and community at large.

Eric Rong, a PhD student working with Professor Michal Lipson, received the Graduate Service Award. Rong has served as an EE Ambassador, president of Graduate Electrical Engineering at Columbia and president of the Optica/SPIE Student Chapter.

• Electrical Engineering Distinguished Teaching Award

Awarded to graduate students and postdoctoral research scientists who demonstrate excellent performance in teaching. 

Leonardo Felipe Toso, a PhD candidate advised by Professor James Anderson, was recognized for his teaching of control theory, machine learning and optimization. A Presidential Fellow and CAIRFI Fellow, Toso studies reinforcement learning, world models, federated learning and adaptive control, with a focus on data-efficient and robust learning algorithms for control systems. His work has appeared in leading machine learning and control venues, and he received the Best Paper Award at the Learning for Dynamics and Control Conference in 2024 and the Outstanding Paper Award at the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in 2025.

Noah Silverman, a PhD student focused on high-power inverters under the supervision of Professor Matthias Preindl, was also recognized. Before Columbia, Silverman studied power electronics at MIT and the University of Colorado Boulder and developed high-voltage systems at Diversified Technologies. His dissertation focuses on electric vehicle motor drives with improved efficiency and power density. He has served as the instructor for Introduction to Power Electronics.

Peter Ballentine, a fourth-year PhD student and NSF Graduate Research Fellow working with Professor Ioannis Kymissis, was honored for his teaching on novel sensors for robotics, radiology and other applications. He was co-instructor for Modern Display Science and Technology.

Oliver Durnan, a fifth-year PhD student also advised by Kymissis, was recognized for his teaching contributions across a wide range of courses, including Digital VLSI Circuits, Principles of Microfabrication, Modern Display Science and Technology, Senior Design Project, Introduction to Electrical Engineering, and The Art of Engineering.

Jeremy Johnston, a postdoctoral research scientist with Prof. Xiaodong Wang. He taught the course Quantum Optimization and Machine Learning at Columbia in Spring 2026.

• Master of Science Award of Excellence

Awarded annually by the Faculty of Electrical Engineering to fewer than 5% of the candidates for the MS degree to recognize outstanding achievement.

This year’s recipients are Justin Arroyo (Columbia Video Network student), a former control systems engineer with RTX who is now doing energy consulting with Kearney; Devika Sanjeev Gumaste, who contributed to computer vision research at Columbia and now works at Known developing multimodal AI systems and advanced AI reporting solutions; Dongliang Guan, who studied under Professor Xiaodong Wang and is now a machine learning engineer at Pinterest focusing on ads ranking systems; and Alexander Oh, a second-year MS/PhD student in Professor Keren Bergman’s Lightwave Research Lab studying integrated photonic devices, circuits and systems for high-speed, low-power data communication.

Other honorees include Yuechen He, who graduated with a master’s in computer engineering and will begin a PhD program in mixed-signal circuit design at NYU Tandon in fall 2026; Sriraman Iyengar, who graduated with a master’s in computer engineering and now works on the AI Foundations team at Capital One; Haoyu Dong, who was advised by Professor Zoran Kostic and will begin a PhD program in computer science and engineering at UC Santa Cruz; Xudong Chen, who was also advised by Kostic and is now working in product quality management for his family business; Gautam Vanishree Raghu, a senior AI engineer at InstaLILY AI whose Columbia research focused on vector databases and retrieval-augmented generation under Professor Asaf Cidon; and Yangfan Wang, who now works at Citadel Securities as an FPGA engineer focusing on low-latency trading systems. Additional recipients include Rajarshi Guchhait and Arsalan Firoozi, a master’s graduate supervised by Prof. Nima Mesgarani, now a PhD researcher in speech neuroscience studying how humans perceive speech with the goal of helping patients with hearing problems regain their lost abilities.

• MS Research Award

Awarded by the Faculty of Electrical Engineering to outstanding graduating MS students who have demonstrated passion and accomplishment in research.

Zhuoya “Monica” Shi was an Electrical Engineering MS student and is recognized for her contributions to compressed sensing optical coherence tomography methods for accelerated biomedical imaging. She is now a PhD student working with Professor Christine Hendon.

Shivalee Shah was a Quantum Science and Technology MS student and is honored for her work on the SCY-QNET quantum network testbed, which enables experimental research in quantum communication. She is now a PhD student working with Professors Gil Zussman and Sebastian Will.

• MS Teaching Award

Awarded to MS students who demonstrate excellent performance in teaching.

Yuchen Teng and Zishock “Max” Kim received the MS Teaching Award. Teng earned her MS degree in February 2026 and was nominated by Professor Xiaodong Wang. She served as TA for ELEN E3801: Signals & Systems in fall 2025, supporting an enrollment of 115 students.

Kim earned his MS degree in February 2026 and was nominated by Professor Debasis Mitra. He served as TA/CA for ELEN 6767: Internet Economics, Engineering, and Security. 

More award luncheon photos can be found here.