ICS News Archive

Ph.D. student wins 2017 Google Fellowship in systems and networking

Khanh Nguyen, a Ph.D. candidate in UCI’s Department of Computer Science, has been selected as a 2017 Google Ph.D. Fellow for North America in the systems and networking category. The Google Ph.D. Fellowship program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students doing exceptional research in computer science and related disciplines. The fellowship includes being matched with a Google Research Mentor and a monetary award that will directly support student expenses, as well as a stipend.

The fellowship program is known for its support of hundreds of future faculty, industry researchers, entrepreneurs and innovators since its inception in 2009. This year, 33 recipients from North America, Europe and the Middle East were chosen as fellows in nine categories: algorithms, optimizations and markets; human-computer interaction; machine learning; machine perception, speech technology and computer vision; natural language processing; privacy and security; programming languages and software engineering; structured data and database management; and systems and networking.

In order to be selected for the honor, students must be full-time graduate students pursuing a Ph.D. and must have completed graduate coursework by the fall of the award year, when the fellowship begins. Students cannot directly apply, but must be nominated by an eligible university. Each entity may only nominate two students, making the award extremely competitive.

Nguyen currently works under his advisor Professor Guoqing (Harry) Xu, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. His research includes ways to develop practical techniques to solve scalability issues in big data systems. He earned both his M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science from UCI in 2015 and 2012, respectively. In addition to becoming a Google Ph.D. Fellow this year, Nguyen is also a 2017 Facebook Fellowship Finalist.