Meet the Scholars: PhD Students with Prestigious Fellowships

Several graduate students have been awarded prestigious scholarships in recognition of their academic excellence and research contributions. These highly competitive scholarships acknowledge the recipients’ dedication to advancing knowledge in their respective fields.

Apple Scholars in AI/ML PhD Fellowship

The Apple Scholars in AIML PhD fellowship recognizes the contributions of researchers in computer science and engineering at the graduate and postgraduate levels.

Purva Tendulkar
Purva Tendulkar is fourth-year PhD candidate advised by Carl Vondrick. Her research vision is to authentically emulate the varied facets of human behavior in our dynamic world. She works on understanding and synthesizing humans by learning 3D representations of human-centric interactions.

Tendulkar earned a MS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2020 and a BS in Computer Science from the College of Engineering, Pune (COEP) in India.
She has interned at the University of Tübingen (2024), Meta Reality Labs (2023), UC San Diego (2020), and AiBee (2019).

At Columbia, she co-organizes the Vision, Interaction, Graphics & Robotics (VIGR) seminar. In her free time, she enjoys listening to and practicing Indian classical music, hiking, and playing board games.

Funai Foundation Overseas Scholarship

The Funai Overseas Scholarship’s purpose is to develop young talent and thereby contribute to the development of Japan’s science and technology fields by providing scholarships to Japanese students who wish to study at graduate schools overseas and obtain a degree. 

Hideaki Takahashi
Hideaki Takahashi is a first-year PhD student advised by Junfeng Yang. He is interested in building practical tools to analyze and improve software security, including new technologies such as AI, smart contracts, etc. His work focuses on the cross-area of AI, security, and systems.

Takahashi graduated in 2024 with a Bachelor of Arts and Science Informatics at The University of Tokyo. He won two silver and three bronze medals at Kaggle, one of the world’s most prestigious AI competition platforms and is a professional eater of sushi.

NSF CISE Graduate Fellowship (CSGrad4US)

The CSGrad4US program aims to increase the number and diversity of domestic graduate students pursuing research and innovation careers in computer and information science and engineering fields. The program helps bachelor’s degree holders return to academia and pursue their research interests, enabling them to engage in innovative and high-impact projects without the burden of financial constraints.

Robin Linzmayer
Robin Linzmayer is a first-year PhD student interested in machine learning applications in medicine with the goal of improving patient outcomes. They will be working with Noemie Elhadad in the Department of Biomedical Informatics.

Linzmayer graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in May 2019 with a BS in Computer Science and a BA in Biology. Afterward, they spent four years building models to extract structured data from unstructured clinical text sources while working as a data scientist at Flatiron Health. In the Spring of 2024, Linzmayer completed a northbound thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail.

Filipp Shelobolin
Filipp Shelobolin is a first-year PhD student working with Augustin Chaintreau and Jeanette Wing on the fairness and explainability of complex machine learning systems.

After receiving a BS in Statistics and Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon in 2021, Filipp worked as a Research Scientist at Upstart for three years. Filipp enjoys writing, performing improv comedy, playing pool, and reading almost anything.

NSF Graduate Research Fellowships Program

The NSF GRFP is a three-year fellowship that recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported STEM disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees.

David Nguyen
David Nguyen is a first-year PhD student working with Brian Smith. He studies video games from the lens of human-computer interaction.

Nguyen received his first bachelor’s degree from UC Los Angeles with a design-your-own-major in “Social Science Research Methodology” and his second bachelor’s degree from UC Irvine in software engineering.

His hobbies include video games, comic books, and trying out new vegan recipes.

Riya Sahni
Riya Sahni is a first-year PhD student interested in Human-Computer and Human-AI Interaction. She is advised by Lydia Chilton and will focus on improving large-scale adoption strategies for AI tools in industry and designing AI tools that enhance productivity.

Sahni graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA in Economics and a BS in Computer Science with a specialization in Human-Computer Interaction in 2023. Before joining Columbia, she worked at Microsoft as a Customer Success Account Manager in the Financial Services Industry. In her free time, she enjoys playing tennis, reading the classics, and learning how to crochet.

Leo Orshansky
Leo Orshansky is a first-year PhD student in the Computer Science Theory group, co-advised by Tal Malkin and Henry Yuen. His research interests lie at the intersection of cryptography and quantum computing, along with broader interests in computational complexity, both quantum and classical.

Orshansky graduated in 2024 from the University of Texas at Austin with B.S. degrees in Computer Science (Honors) and Mathematics, as well as a minor in Chinese Language. He was named a 2024 Dean’s Honored Graduate from the College of Natural Sciences at UT Austin, with a distinction in research.

Outside of the academic realm, Orshansky is passionate about learning languages, speed-solving the New York Times crossword, playing board games, and running.

Samsung Fellow

Jihwan Kim is a first-year doctoral student in the Software Systems Lab, working with Junfeng Yang. His research interests are based on security, robustness of machine learning, and developing tools to find security vulnerability.

Kim received a BS in computer science from Sogang University in South Korea in 2015 and worked as a Software Engineer at Samsung Electronics. He also loves to travel and explore new places around the world.

SEAS Fellowships

The School of Engineering and Applied Sciences established fellowships to recruit outstanding students from around the world to pursue graduate studies at the school.

Mudd Fellow

Zechao Cai
Zechao Cai is a first-year PhD student co-advised by Jason Nieh and Gail Kaiser. His research interests focus on next-generation System-on-Chip (SoC) systems, spanning Operating Systems, Computer Architecture, and Formal Methods. He earned his MS in Computer Science from Zhejiang University in 2023 and holds a BE from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies.

Outside of research, Zechao is passionate about music, particularly electronica and classical. He enjoys vinyl digging, DJing, and playing table tennis and video games in his free time.

Tang Fellow

Yi Rong
Yi Rong is a first-year PhD student in the Software Systems Laboratory, advised by Ronghui Gu. She is interested in formal methods and verification.

Rong obtained a B.Eng. in Software Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2024. In her free time, she enjoys traveling and trying out new restaurants.

Greenwood Fellow

Conlan Olson

Conlan Olson is a first-year PhD student advised by Rich Zemel and Toni Pitassi. Their research focuses on fairness and privacy, and they are interested in responsible computing and applications of technology to social justice.

Olson graduated from Harvard University with an AB in math and computer science in 2021 and an EdM Master’s in Education in 2023. Before Columbia, they taught math and special education at a high school. Outside of computer science, they enjoy writing and working on sewing projects.

Presidential Fellows

Hailie Mitchell
Hailie Mitchell is a first-year PhD student advised by Junfeng Yang. She is interested in working on how to make the software development process easier for developers by leveraging AI and how to effectively test those AI systems and tools.

Mitchell graduated from Dickinson College in 2024 with a BS in Computer Science, and in her free time enjoys going to concerts, reading, and hiking.

Shreyas Havaldar
Shreyas Havaldar is a first-year PhD student in Elias Bareinboim’s Causal Artificial Intelligence Lab. He aspires to build an impactful research career in trustworthy machine learning to create systems that are accountable, accessible, equitable, and inclusive. His goal is to fundamentally understand artificial intelligence and make it even more intelligent.

Havaldar graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad (IIT) in 2022 with a Bachelor of Technology (Honors) in Computer Science. He worked at Google DeepMind for two years as a researcher before joining Columbia. His work has been recognized with the Academic Excellence Award, Best Paper Award at the Adversarial ML Workshop at CVPR ’21, KVPY Fellowship, INSPIRE Fellowship, Times Spark Scholarship, and Research Week with Google Invitation, among others.

He loves exploring new places, new activities, and learning random facts. He scrolls Wikipedia pages for fun, visits museums whenever he can, and travels as much as possible. Fun fact: he’s visited 12 countries in the last nine months.

Nikolaos Pagonas
Nikos Pagonas is a first-year PhD student working with Kostis Kaffes. His research focuses on distributed systems and cloud computing. Currently, he is working on improving the performance of large language model serving.

Pagonas received his MEng and BSc degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 2024. Before joining Columbia, he was a research intern at Brown University, where he worked on the design and development of a serverless shell.

In his free time, he loves singing, playing guitar and piano, as well as fervently crossing off concerts from his ever-increasing bucket list.

Ziang Ren
Ziang Ren is a first-year CS PhD student advised by Xia Zhou. His research focuses on improving the perception abilities of agents using various techniques in computer vision and mobile computing.

In his leisure time, Ren enjoys painting, playing the piano, and tennis. He received an MS degree from Dartmouth College in 2024 and a BS degree from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2022.

Styopa Zharkov
Styopa Zharkov is a first-year PhD student in the theory group with an interest in algorithms. They are advised by Alex Andoni and Cliff Stein.

Zharkov graduated from Stanford University with a BS in math and an MS in computer science. Outside of research, they make clothes, dance tango, roller skate, and go backpacking.

SEAS Doctoral Fellows

Soyoon Park
Soyoon Park is a first-year PhD student working with Martha Kim on computer architecture, keen on increasing computational energy efficiencies via modeling. She is also interested in algorithms found in nontraditional computational systems.

Park graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024 as part of the Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research (VIPER), receiving a BSE in Computer Engineering and a BA in Mathematics. She enjoys listening to music, seeing Broadway shows, and traveling to new places.

Georgios Liargkovas
Georgios Liargkovas is a first-year PhD student advised by Kostis Kaffes. His research focuses on operating systems (OS) scheduling, with a particular interest in leveraging machine learning to enhance scheduling decisions.

In 2023 he graduated with a BS in Management Science and Technology from Athens University of Economics and Business in Greece. During his undergraduate studies, Liargkovas was a research assistant at BALab under Diomidis Spinellis, where he focused on empirical software engineering research. He also collaborated with the Atlas Systems Group at Brown University, working on shell-script parallelization alongside Nikos Vasilakis.

His broader research interests include system design and optimization, cloud computing, and software engineering. In his free time, he is passionate about long-distance running, hiking, music, and cooking.