Doctoral student Jeremy Andrus, who is studying computer science, will receive a full-tuition scholarship next year—courtesy of Facebook.
Facebook announced last week that Andrus, a second-year Ph.D. student at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, is one of 12 winners of the 2012-13 Facebook Fellowship. The social networking website gives the award each year to promising computer science doctoral students.
Andrus, who was selected from a pool of more than 300 applicants, said he was very excited to be receiving the full scholarship and more than $35,000 in other stipends.
“I found out via email from Facebook and was pretty excited since I know it’s a really competitive fellowship,” he said. “I’m very excited that they chose me.”
This spring, Facebook will fly Andrus and the other fellowship winners to its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., where they will present and discuss their research. Andrus has been working to create “virtual phones,” a process that involves creating multiple “personas” on a single physical cell phone unit.
“The research that I’m doing has to do with mobile computing,” he said. “In the project, we were able to run multiple instances of Android on each phone so one cell phone could become two or three or four.”
Computer science professor Jason Nieh said that the research Andrus is conducting is practical, and that “if you actually run a virtual phone, you can’t tell any difference from running it on the native device.”
“What Jeremy’s done is build a technology to create multiple virtual phones—they look exactly like normal phones but they run on the same physical device and are isolated and secure from each other,” he said.
Nieh also praised Andrus for his “fantastic technical ability and good choice in problem-solving skills.”
“He’s an outstanding Ph.D. student,” Nieh said. “I think the CS department here at Columbia and in Jeremy’s department is a top-notch group of people.”
Likewise, computer science professor Roxana Geambasu called Andrus’ academic record “unbelievably impressive,” noting that he won two best paper awards at conferences, after working on the papers for a year and a half. She said that while computer scientists sometimes rush to publish papers because of the field’s competitive nature, Andrus is diligent and careful.
“You kind of start to understand why he’s unique,” she said. “In my opinion, Jeremy’s an amazing guy.”
“His work is unbelievably practical,” she added. “He works on real, practical things and builds real systems more than a lot of people in the industry do.”
Andrus said his research was a big part of his proposal for the Facebook Fellowship, saying that it took his application “to the next level.”
“It’s kind of an honor to be chosen for something like this, mostly because it’s so competitive,” he said. “They gave out 12 fellowships, so the competition was high. It’s exciting for me because it gives me recognition for the work that I’m doing and excited about.”
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