Every year, ACM SIGCOMM presents the Rising Star Award to recognize young researchers—individuals no older than 35—for their work in communication networks in the early part of their career. The nominees are evaluated on the depth, impact and novelty of their research. Also of particular interest are strong research contributions made independently from the nominee's Ph.D. advisor.

Feamster currently leads the Network Operations and Internet Security (NOISE) Lab at Georgia Tech. His research focuses on developing tools, techniques and protocols to improve the availability and performance of communications networks. The primary goal of his research is to help network operators run their networks better, and to enable users of these networks to experience high availability and good end-to-end performance.