Poulami Das, a Georgia Tech Ph.D. candidate in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), has been selected to attend two high-profile conferences this fall: the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) and Rising Stars in EECS.

In September she will attend HLF in Heidleberg, Germany. The opportunity to join the annual forum is provided exclusively to outstanding young scientists in mathematics and computer science (or closely related fields) at the undergraduate/pre-master, graduate Ph.D. and postdoc levels.

In order to participate, young researchers must pass a multi-step application and selection process. Two hundred are then carefully selected and given the opportunity to spend a week at HLF interacting with the laureates of the disciplines. Each year the recipients of the most prestigious awards in mathematics and computer science, the Abel Prize, ACM A.M. Turing Award, ACM Prize in Computing, Fields Medal, IMU Abacus Medal and Nevanlinna Prize are named laureates and invited to participate in the forum.  Laureates give lectures on subjects of their choosing which are primarily directed at the participating young scientists. Those lectures are the starting point of intensive discussions between the laureates and the young researchers during the forum.

Additionally, Das has been selected to attend Rising Stars in EECS, an academic career workshop in electrical engineering and computer science. This year’s workshop will be held in October at the University of Texas at Austin. Rising Stars is an intensive workshop for graduate students and postdocs with historically marginalized or underrepresented genders who are interested in pursuing academic careers in electrical engineering, computer science, and artificial intelligence and decision-making. Launched at MIT in 2012, the annual event has since been hosted at the University of California at Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“I am very honored to be selected to attend both the Heidelberg Laureate Forum and the Rising Stars in EECS Workshop,” said Das. “As a candidate excited about joining the academic job market this fall, both these events will offer me the extra-ordinary opportunity to learn from experts across multiple research domains about their thoughts on building a strong, impactful, and healthy research group.”

Das is advised by Moinuddin Qureshi, professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. She is the recipient of the Microsoft Research Ph.D Fellowship and received the 2022 Colonel Oscar P. Cleaver Award for most outstanding Ph.D. dissertation proposal in ECE for her research on architecture and software for reliable quantum computing.