Every year, the Facebook Fellowship program awards PhD candidates conducting research in important topics across computer science and engineering such as computer vision, programming languages, computational social science, and more. Recipients of the Facebook Fellowship award receive tuition and fees paid for up to two academic years and a stipend of $42,000, which includes conference travel support.

The program is now in its ninth year and has supported over 108 PhD candidates from a broad range of universities. This year, we’ve selected 36 outstanding Fellows from 16 universities in the U.S. and six universities outside of the U.S. Altogether, we received 1,876 applications from over 100 universities worldwide.

“Submissions have more than doubled since last year. We added more research areas for students to apply for, and that list will continue to grow every year,” says Sharon Ayalde, Facebook Research Program Manager for the Fellowship program. “It’s exciting to see the program grow and evolve with each new cohort.”

The Fellows are also invited to Facebook HQ in Menlo Park to attend the annual Fellowship Summit. The Summit is an opportunity for Fellows to network with the rest of their cohort, share their research, and learn more about what researchers at Facebook are working on. “Congratulations to this year’s exceptional group of Fellows,” says Ayalde. “We look forward to meeting you in person at the Summit!”

2020 Facebook Fellows

Applied statistics

Lydia Zakynthinou
Northeastern University

Finalist: Edwin Fong, University of Oxford

AR/VR photonics and optics

Min Chul Shin
Columbia University

Finalists: Nathan Tessema Ersumo, UC Berkeley; Shubhra Shweta Pasayat, UC Santa Barbara

AR/VR privacy and ethics

William (Bill) Fritz
University of Oxford

Samaneh Zamanifard
Clemson University

Blockchain and cryptocurrency

Lucianna Kiffer
Northeastern University

Finalists: Erica Blum, University of Maryland, College Park; Ankush Das, Carnegie Mellon University; Yan Ji, Cornell University; Vibhaalakshmi Sivaraman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Computational social science

Ashwin Rajadesingan
University of Michigan

Finalists: Jennifer Sara Dargin, Texas A&M University; Sindhu Kiranmai Ernala, Georgia Institute of Technology

Computer graphics

Anna Frühstück
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

Yuanming Hu
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Zackary Misso
Dartmouth College

Merlin Nimier-David
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Finalists: Rana Hanocka, Tel Aviv University; Yifan Wang, ETH Zurich

Computer storage and efficiency

Juncheng Yang
Carnegie Mellon University

Finalists: Tanvir Ahmed Khan, University of Michigan; Sinjoni Mukhopadhyay, UC Santa Cruz

Computer vision

Devendra Singh Chaplot
Carnegie Mellon University

Michelle Guo
Stanford University

Cihang Xie
Johns Hopkins University

Finalists: Alejandro Newell, Princeton University; Despoina Paschalidou, ETH Zurich and Max Planck Institute; Xingyi Zhou, The University of Texas at Austin

Distributed systems

Akshitha Sriraman
University of Michigan

Finalist: Yizhou Shan, UC San Diego

Economics and computation

Alireza Farhadi
University of Maryland

Finalists: Andres Ignacio Cristi Espinosa, Universidad de Chile; Paul Gölz, Carnegie Mellon University; Charikleia Podimata, Harvard University; Bryan Wilder, Harvard University

Instagram/Facebook app well-being and safety

Diana Freed
Cornell University

Sharifa Sultana
Cornell University

Finalists: Avriel Epps-Darling, Harvard University; Mitchell Louis Gordon, Stanford University; Tao Jiang, the Ohio State University; Nora Kirkizh, GESIS Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences

Machine learning

Xinyun Chen
UC Berkeley

Dimitris Tsipras
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Finalists: Rohan Chitnis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Drew Hudson, Stanford University; Lisa Lee, Carnegie Mellon University; Daniel Levy, Stanford University; Zhiyuan Li, Princeton University; Aravind Rajeswaran, University of Washington; Mengye Ren, University of Toronto; Yang Song, Stanford University

Natural language processing

Alane Suhr
Cornell University

Elena Voita
University of Amsterdam

Finalists: Esin Durmus, Cornell University; Anna Darling Goldie, Stanford University; Ariel Holtzman, University of Washington

Networking and connectivity

Nofel Yaseen
University of Pennsylvania

Finalists: Maria Apostolaki, ETH Zurich; Xiaoqi Chen, Princeton University; Praveen Kumar, Cornell University

Privacy and data use

Moses Namara
Clemson University

David Pujol
Duke University

Finalists: Reza Ghaiumy Anaraky, Clemson University; Natã Miccael Barbosa, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Yixin Zou, University of Michigan

Programming languages

Saikat Dutta
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Finalist: Rashmi Mudduluru, University of Washington

Security and privacy

Huiying Li
University of Chicago

Nirvan Tyagi
Cornell University

Finalists: Wenbo Guo, Pennsylvania State University; Samuel Galphin Havron, Cornell University; Lucy Li, Cornell University; Ranjita Pai Kasturi, Georgia Institute of Technology; Nathan Manohar, UCLA; Bijeeta Pal, Cornell University; Daniel Votipka, University of Maryland, College Park; Jiaheng Zhang, UC Berkeley

Social and economic policy

Gauthami Penakalapati
UC Berkeley

Briana Vecchione
Cornell University

Heng Tseng Wen
Queen Mary University of London

Spoken language processing and audio classification

Sai Krishna Rallabandi
Carnegie Mellon University

Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai
Carnegie Mellon University

Finalists: Murali Karthick Baskar, Brno University of Technology; Yi Luo, Columbia University

Structured data stores

Panagiotis Sioulas
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Yannis Chronis
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Systems for machine learning

Doris Jung-Lin Lee
UC Berkeley

Finalist: Peter Kraft, Stanford University

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To learn more, visit the Facebook Fellowship Program page.