ACADEMIA

Ashwin Aji, of Blacksburg, Va., a doctoral candidate at the Virginia Tech College of Engineering’s Department of Computer Science, has received one of 12 fellowships awarded worldwide for 2012-13 by NVIDIA, a global technology company.

The $25,000 fellowship will be used in Aji’s research, aimed at researching and developing next-generation supercomputing techniques and tools to tackle large-scale problems, such as epidemiology and genomic sequence analysis.

Aji is an active member of the Systems, Networking and Renaissance Grokking Laboratory, known as the SyNeRGy research lab, directed by his Ph.D. advisor, Wu Feng, an associate professor of computer science who holds a Turner Fellowship.

Prior to moving to Virginia Tech in 2006, SyNeRGy was previously known as RADIANT when it was housed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. SyNeRGy is affiliated with the Center for High-End Computing Systems at Virginia Tech.

Aji also works at the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Lab at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech. This institute is a research facility that uses transdisciplinary approaches combining information technology, biology, and medicine to interpret and apply vast amounts of biological data generated from basic research to some of today’s key challenges in the biomedical, environmental, and agricultural sciences.

Aji’s resume also includes a summer internship at Argonne National Laboratory’s Mathematics and Computer Science Department as well as professional stints as a software developer at National Instruments in Bangalore, India, and at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington.

He obtained his bachelor’s degree in computer science in 2004 from the R.V. College of Engineering of Visweswaraiah Technological University, Bangalore, India. He earned his master’s degree in computer science in 2008 from Virginia Tech. The department named him its outstanding master’s student at its graduation ceremony in 2009.

NVIDIA Foundation is also supporting Aji’s adviser’s work as Feng received its first worldwide award for research in 2011 that they hope will compute a cure for cancer.

NVIDIA, based in Santa Clara, Calif., focuses on visual computing technology and is the inventor of the graphic processing unit commonly referred to as GPU.

The NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Program provides funding to Ph.D. students who are researching topics that will lead to major advances in the graphics and high-performance computing industries, and are investigating innovative ways of leveraging the power of GPUs. Recipients receive crucial funding for their research, and are provided access to NVIDIA products, technology, and expertise.

“This year the NVIDIA Foundation joined in our search for top Ph.D. students who are investigating innovative ways to leverage the power of the GPU, especially those that will ultimately benefit humanity,” said Chandra Cheij, NVIDIA’s research program manager. “Congratulations to Ashwin and to Virginia Tech for this significant achievement.”