Ph.D. Student Receives Graduate Fellowship from NVIDIA
Toluwanimi Odemuyiwa is one of ten Ph.D. students in the country to receive the 2024-2025 NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship. The award includes a scholarship of up to $60,000 and a high-end NVIDIA graphics processing card, or GPU, to support innovative research that may lead to major advances in accelerated computing, such as artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles.
"The NVIDIA fellowship is a testament to the amazing mentorship I have around me," Odemuyiwa said. "I am excited to interact with and learn from top industry researchers and bridge the gap between academia and industry in my work."
Odemuyiwa researches tensor algebra, which deals with computations on multidimensional data, to understand and represent graph algorithms through her doctoral program in electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Davis. Her work promises more efficient solutions for real-world systems like network medicine, where graphs representing genes, proteins, or metabolic pathways are used to identify diseases and determine how drugs can target them.
"The NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship is one of the very most prestigious in the field of parallel computing," said John Owens, Odemuyiwa's advisor and Child Family Professor of Engineering and Entrepreneurship at UC Davis. "I am delighted that Toluwa earned this honor — her research is so creative and interesting and holds so much promise to have a significant impact."
Odemuyiwa marks the fifth doctoral student in Owens' research group to have received the fellowship, following Saman Ashkiani in 2016, Pinar Muyan-Ozcelik in 2011, Anjul Patney in 2009 and 2010, and Shubhabrata Sengupta in 2007 and 2008.