ECE ILLINOIS PhD student wins Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship

ECE ILLINOIS PhD student Matthew J Tomei was recently awarded the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship, a highly prestigious and competitive fellowship awarded to PhD students from a preselected variety of top schools. This is the first Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship for an ECE student in the 11-year history of this fellowship and the first fellowship for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 2013.

 "This fellowship was awarded for our work on waferscale system design for graph processing applications. I hope that this award indicates a coming resurgence of waferscale systems as well as our ability to help make that happen. I am grateful to my advisor Professor Kumar for his guidance and support that led to this award. I am also thankful to my collaborators at UCLA who we jointly work with on this project," said Tomei.

According to the Qualcomm website, the fellowship recognizes, rewards, and mentors PhD students based on their core values of innovation, execution, and teamwork. This fellowship enables graduate students to be mentored by Qualcomm engineers and supports them in their journey to achieving their research goals. 

"The award is very well-deserved. Matt is an extraordinary student with uncommon technical depth and breadth. I cannot imagine a better student to lead this project that requires us to think through the entire computing stack - all the way from the programming model to hardware prototyping," said Tomei's advisor, ECE ILLINOIS Associate Professor Rakesh Kumar. "The fellowship is yet another recognition for Matt's work on waferscale computing that has already generated significant interest."