"The one thing that is truly exceptional about Josh is his independence and self-motivation. […] He has identified open problems and proceeded to make progress on these. Josh is a 4th year PhD student, whose research is, broadly speaking, in theoretical computer science, and more specifically in the design of distributed algorithms for sampling problems. His most recent result includes a fast distributed algorithm for randomly sampling spanning trees. Josh will use the support of the post-comprehensive fellowship to work further on distributed spanning tree sampling and also extend his work to other sampling problems."
- Prof. Sriram Pemmaraju
PhD Advisor
"This research is highly novel and will represent a significant advancement in health informatics particularly in developing clinically meaningful models applicable to the needs of health care systems, health care providers, and people with cancer... Ms. Zeinali’s area of research using AI techniques and electronic health record data has the potential to inform future technologies that can provide real-time treatment planning that will contribute to improved clinical outcomes, reduced harm, and conserve health care resources"
- Prof. Stephanie Gilbertson-White
PhD Advisor; Director of the College of Nursing
About the Spring 2025 Graduate College Fellows
PhD candidate Josh Sobel (Computer Science - 4th year) was awarded a Graduate College Post-Comprehensive Research Fellowship for Spring 2025.
Fellow doctorate student Nahid Zeinali (IGPI - 4th year) received the Ballard and Seashore Dissertation Fellowship.
"I am thankful for the Post-Comp Research Fellowship as it will let me focus on my research in distributed computing; in particular distributed Markov chains and sampling and counting algorithms"
- Josh Sobel
Advisor: Sriram Pemmaraju
"I am deeply honored to receive this fellowship, which will allow me to fully dedicate myself to completing my dissertation. My research focuses on enhancing cancer symptom detection through AI techniques and large language models (LLMs), utilizing electronic health records (EHRs) to improve patient care. This support is invaluable in helping me advance this critical work toward better healthcare outcomes"
- Nahid Zeinali
Advisor: Stephanie Gilbertson-White
About the Fellowships
Ballard and Seashore Dissertation Fellowship
This fellowship program provides an opportunity for Ph.D. students to benefit from a final semester of protected and supported time to focus on completing their scholarly research activities and the writing of their dissertations.
Graduate College Post-Comprehensive Research Fellowship
This fellowship program provides an opportunity for advanced Ph.D. students to benefit from protected and supported time to pursue their scholarly research activities. The fellowship is intended to recognize students with distinguished academic achievement during their early graduate training. These achievements should be evident from a combination of outstanding academic performance in coursework, as well as early scholarly research activities. Students who have held teaching assistantships in the previous two semesters will have priority.