Facebook is proud to announce the 2019 Facebook Fellowship and Emerging Scholar Award winners. This year, 21 Fellows and seven Emerging Scholars were chosen out of more than 900 applications from talented PhD students from all over the world.

The Facebook Fellowship program is now in its eighth year and has supported over 85 top PhD candidates. The program is designed to encourage and support promising doctoral students engaged in innovative and relevant research across computer science and engineering. The research topics from this year’s cohort spanned across the following research areas:

• Applied Statistics
• AR/VR Photonics and Optics
• Computational Social Science
• Computer Vision
• Compute Storage and Efficiency
• Distributed Systems
• Economics and Computation
• Hardware and Software Infrastructure for Machine Learning
• Machine Learning
• Natural Language Processing
• Networking and Connectivity
• Programming Languages
• Security and Privacy
• Spoken Language Processing and Audio Classification
• UX/Instagram Well-being

Launched in 2017, Emerging Scholar Awards are open to first- or second-year PhD students. The program is specifically designed to support talented students from traditionally under-represented minority groups* in the technology sector, to encourage them to continue their PhD studies, pursue innovative research and engage with the broader research community.

“We’re excited about the continued year-on-year growth and expansion of both programs, resulting in applications from top-tier schools around the world,” said Sharon Ayalde, research program manager. “We’re especially pleased with the increased gender and cultural diversity of the winners and the applicants overall.”

All Fellows and Emerging Scholars are invited to the Fellowship and Emerging Scholar Summit at Facebook HQ in Menlo Park this fall. The PhD students join Facebook researchers for a multi-disciplinary program designed to share ideas across research areas and spark new ones. The Fellows and Emerging Scholars will share their research and also learn more about the technology challenges Facebook is working on.

Congratulations to this year’s exceptional group of Fellows and Emerging Scholars!

Fellowship Recipients

Mikel Artetxe
University of the Basque Country

Benjamin Berg
Carnegie Mellon University

Ricky Tian Qi Chen
University of Toronto

Tingjun Chen
Columbia University

Abhishek Das
Georgia Institute of Technology

Gabriele Farina
Carnegie Mellon University

Snehalkumar ‘Neil’ S. Gaikwad
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Aishwarya Ganesan
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Amir Kafshdar Goharshady
Institute of Science and Technology Austria

Kartik Hegde
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Nan Rosemary Ke
University of Montreal

Jeremias Knoblauch
University of Warwick

Yijun Li
University of California, Merced

Josué Jacob López
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Allison McDonald
University of Michigan

Shruti Palaskar
Carnegie Mellon University

Anastasios Papagiannis
University of Crete

Minjoon Seo
University of Washington

Giridhari Venkatadri
Northeastern University

Daricia Wilkinson
Clemson University

Chao-Yuan Wu
University of Texas at Austin

Emerging Scholar Award Recipients

Claudia Flores-Saviaga
West Virginia University

Yaecob Girmay Gezahegn
Mekelle Institute of Technology – Mekelle University

Ghassen Jerfel
Duke University

Angélica Aparecida Moreira
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

Vanessa Oguamanam
Georgia Institute of Technology

Maria Bauza Villalonga
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Ranysha Ware
Carnegie Mellon University

*For the purpose of the Emerging Scholar Award, “under-represented minority group” is considered to include persons who identify as: Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Native American or Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.