EE/CE Graduate Student Awards 2024
Columbia University's Electrical Engineering Department is renowned for fostering innovation and excellence among their students. This year, the Graduate Awards 2024 ceremony once again highlighted the remarkable achievements of its students. Here's a detailed look at the awards and their deserving recipients. The EE faculty and staff wished all of our students a bright chapter forward.
Edwin Howard Armstrong Memorial Award
The Edwin Howard Armstrong Memorial Award, endowed with $1,000, honors an outstanding MS candidate who exemplifies the spirit of innovation that marked the life of 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.
Alexander Ranschaert
Alexander started here as a MS student in Fall 2022. After doing a research project under the supervision of Prof. Khodagholy was offered to continue as a PhD student in Fall 2023. Where he as excel no only as a student but as a researcher. He has been working on an organic wireless powering system for compact neural recording devices in rodent models at the Translational NeuroElectronics Lab.
Eli Jury Award
Since its establishment in 1991, the Eli Jury Award has been awarded to a graduate student for outstanding achievement in systems, communications, signal processing, or circuits, along with a $1,000 prize. This year's recipients include:
Nanyu Zeng
Nanyu is currently a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Ken Shepard. Nanyu was the lead on a complex multi-year DARPA effort that resulted in the design of a brain-computer interface device at the scale of 65k electrodes in the form of a single wireless integrated circuit chip, which is thinned and placed on the pial brain surface.
Matthew Hoyin Jahnes
Matthew is currently a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Matthias Preindl. He supported numerous collaborative projects within and outside of Prof. Preindl’s lab, including the Formula SAE team.
Electrical Engineering Collaborative Research Award
Recognizing superb contributions to collaborative research efforts, the Electrical Engineering Collaborative Research Award ($500) was awarded to:
Brian Lance Frost
Brian is an EE doctoral student who finished his PhD in February 2024. Working with Prof. Elizabeth Olson and others in the Olson lab, Brian advanced the use of the optical coherence tomography system for these measurements.Working with Prof. Christine Hendon, Brian applied signal processing strategies to develop a new way of analyzing motion measurements in the cochlea.
Stuart Richard Daudlin
Stuart completed his PhD on Energy Efficient and High Density Integrated Photonic Transceivers in the summer of 2023. Stuart led critical collaborations with Prof. Michal Lipson and Prof. Alex Gaeta at Columbia, as well as with Prof. Al Molnar at Cornell. The close integration of the efforts required co-design of the electronics (from Cornell) with Stuart’s integrated photonic link, as well as with the comb lasers developed by Lipson and Gaeta.
Master of Science Award of Excellence
This award, recognizing fewer than 5% of MS candidates for outstanding achievement, comes with a $250 prize. This year’s recipients include:
Kijung Lee, Xilin Jiang, Yukun Huang, James Venditto, Rohit Nandakumar, Abdul Latif Bamba, Zixuan Yan, Dane Malangone, Alban Dietrich, Patrick Le Roy Munar, Cynthia Wu, Madeleine Kearns, Yichen Xu, Ajinkeya Chitrey, and Abdullah Alhadlaq.
MS Research Award
The MS Research Award, which honors one outstanding MS graduate who has shown passion and accomplishment in research, was awarded to:
Danyang Cheng
Danyang is a MS student in our Electrical Engineering Department and she is Master Student Research Assistant with Prof. Christine Hendon’s group where she is finishing her MS specialization. Her research mainly focused on the hardware development of near-infrared spectroscopy for cardiac mapping. She was also a recipient of Tesla Scholars in 2022 and MS Honors Students in 2023.
Oliver William MacGregor
Oliver is a MS student in our Electrical Engineering Department and he is doing research under the supervision of Prof.Matthias Preindl.
Jacob Millman Award – For Outstanding TAs
Awarded for exemplary performance as a Teaching Assistant, this $250 prize went to:
Alfred Festus Davidson
Alfred is currently a Phd student under the supervision of Prof. Krishnaswamy. He received the B.Tech. (Hons.) and M.Tech. degrees from ITT Madras..in electrical engineering from IIT Madras, Chennai, India in 2020. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering under the guidance of Prof. Harish Krishnaswamy. He is also a SEAS Presidential Fellow
Mor Shimshi
Alfred and Mor were TAs for the 6350 VLSI Design Lab in Spring 2023. Their service was outstanding, way beyond what is expected of a regular TA. They are TA’ing the VLSI Design Lab again in 2024, putting in hours of their time and energy to help students learn chip design and to be effective at building a chip from scratch.
Manav Pietro Kohli
Manav was a TA in the Wireless and Mobile Networking class (ELEN 9701) and three times for the Computer Networks classes (CSEE 4119). He did an excellent job as a TA and did his best to help the students understand the course material.
Graduate Service Award
Vinay Raghavan
Vinay was awarded for his leadership as president of the Graduate Electrical Engineering at Columbia (GEEC) during challenging times, received this award.
Electrical Engineering Distinguished Teaching Award
Awarded to graduate students and postdoctoral research scientists who demonstrate excellent performance in teaching. This award was given to:
Tom Koch
Tom is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University under Ethan Katz-Bassett. I am in my final year and actively engage in research, advising, and teaching. I received my B.S. and M.S. degree from The Cooper Union. His research focuses on large-scale interdomain problems on the Internet including system design, performance optimization, and reliability and how we can use both analytical and measurement methods to solve those problems. Recently I have worked on optimizing interdomain routing for large cloud/content providers, under the supervision of Prof. Ethan Bassett.
Kevin Kam
Kevin received his BS degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa in 2017 and his MS degree from Columbia University in 2020. He joined CLUE in 2018 and is an NSF Fellow through the GRFP program. His current research is in the effects of aging in organic light emitting diode (OLED) large area displays and in designing implantable CMOS systems for biomedical telemetry.
Mehmet Turkcan
Mehmet is a postdoctoral research scientist supervised by Prof. Zoran Kostic. In 2023, Mehmet taught two graduate-level courses as a lecturer: Neural Networks and Deep Learning, and Advanced Deep Learning. Mehmet actively supervised the research activities of 10 MS-level students throughout the year. In addition, he mentored three high school students over a period of six weeks during summer for the Engineering the Next Generation (ENG) outreach program, which is part of the Columbia-led NSF Engineering Research Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3).
The Graduate Awards ceremony not only recognizes individual achievements but also celebrates the vibrant, collaborative spirit of Columbia's engineering community. Each recipient has demonstrated exceptional commitment to advancing technology and enriching the academic environment.