Two University of Rochester doctoral students have received fellowships from the U.S. Department of Energy—one in computer science and one in physics.
Louis Jenkins, a first-year doctoral student from Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, is the University’s first computer science student to receive the Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. Alex Chin, a second-year doctoral student from Chestnut Ridge, New York, will receive the National Nuclear Security Administration Stewardship Science Graduate Fellowship.
The computational science fellowship was established in 1991 and provides outstanding benefits and opportunities to students pursuing doctoral degrees in fields that use high-performance computing to solve complex science and engineering problems.
Jenkins is investigating the use of emerging persistent-memory technologies to enhance productivity and performance of fault-tolerance mechanisms in high-performance computing.
Jenkins graduated in 2017 from Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. He received honorable mention in the Computing Research Association’s 2017 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher competition, based largely on his work on high-performance concurrent hash maps for the Go programming language. He’ll use the fellowship to further his research at Rochester.
“While high-performance computing is my primary focus, my true end-goal is to provide such a system that can be usable in your run-of-the-mill user application,” he says.
Chin’s fellowship was established in 2006 to meet a demand for scientists with deep training in areas of interest to stewardship science. It supports the education of doctoral students who study high-energy density physics, nuclear science, or materials under extreme conditions and hydrodynamics.
Chin is the second Rochester student to win this fellowship, and one of five chosen in the country this year. The fellowship will fund his research at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics in the High Energy Density Physics research group.
He received his undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics from SUNY Geneseo. His research involves using x-ray absorption spectroscopy to study Earth core materials under extreme conditions, with the hope of gaining insight into the evolution of the Earth and Earth-like planets.
