6 UCLA Samueli Doctoral Students Awarded Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships

Three pairs of doctoral students at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering have been awarded the 2026 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships for North America to support their research into autonomous vehicles and next-generation semiconductor technologies.

The fellowship recognizes graduate students conducting innovative research in artificial intelligence, machine learning, wireless communication and hardware design. This year, Qualcomm selected 16 winning teams from eight universities. Each fellow receives $50,000 and an opportunity to collaborate with Qualcomm researchers.

Seth Zhao, a computer science doctoral student, and Zewei Zhou, a civil engineering doctoral student, were selected for their project “Think Deep — Move Fast: Building Vision-Language-Action Models for Generalizable Autonomous Driving with Deep Reasoning and Efficient Action Generation.” Zhao is advised by Bolei Zhou, an associate professor of computer science, and Zewei Zhou is guided by Jiaqi Ma, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and computer science.

George Karfakis and Samyak Chakrabarty, both doctoral students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, received the fellowship for their project “Heterogeneous Chiplet-Based Architecture for Fully-Weight-Stationary Compute-in-Memory Execution of Billion-Parameter Models.” Karfakis is advised by Puneet Gupta and Chakrabarty by Sudhakar Pamarti, both professors in the department.

Sujoy Ghosh and Daniel McGovern, doctoral students in electrical and computer engineering, were recognized for their project “Thermocompression Bonded III-V/Si Integration Platform for Optical, RF/mmWave and Power Devices.” Ghosh is advised by Subramanian Iyer, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering and materials science and engineering, and holder of the Charles P. Reames Endowed Chair in Electrical Engineering. McGovern is advised by Benjamin Williams, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and chair of the department.