Joshua Dillon, a Ph.D. student in Computational Science & Engineering, has been selected for a prestigious two-year Marshall Sherfield Fellowship at the University of Cambridge.

Dillon, who is advised by Assistant Professor Guy Lebanon, works in machine learning, computational statistics and information visualization. At Cambridge he will work with Zoubin Ghahramani, professor of information engineering in the Department of Engineering.
 
“I am primarily interested in exploring the statistical theory aspects of machine learning and how these insights can be exploited for more efficient and effective data modeling and prediction,” said Dillon, who grew up on a small farm in Michigan and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Michigan Technological and Purdue universities, respectively. “I am interested in large-scale data problems, primarily text analysis, as well as modeling challenges present in image processing, biological data and social structure.”

Georgia Tech has had more students win the Marshall Sherfield award than any other U.S. university. The fellowships have been offered since 1998 when they were begun to mark the 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan, and the awards are part of the distinguished Marshall Scholarships program. Georgia Tech now has two Marshall awards this year; 2009 graduate Nick Wellkamp was named a Marshall Scholar in November and will go to Oxford University next fall.