Graduate Fellowships

Recognizing Excellence

CS graduate student awards and fellowships recognize achievement and leadership contributions in the classroom and in the research lab.

• Department-Endowed Awards
• Department-Endowed Fellowships
• College and Campus Awards & Fellowships
• National Awards and Fellowships

Department Awards

C. W. Gear Outstanding Graduate Student
In recognition of the longtime contributions and services of Charles W. Gear to the University of Illinois and to the Department of Computer Science, contributions from alumni, friends, and former students established an endowed fund to annually honor a graduate student who has demonstrated excellence in research and service, as well as two undergraduates who intend to pursue graduate studies.

David J. Kuck Outstanding Thesis Awards
These awards were established by alumni, friends, and former students in recognition of David Kuck's intellectual and leadership contributions.  Kuck was professor of computer science from 1965-1993. In 1977, he developed the Parafrase compiler system, which is used as a test bed for the development of many new ideas on vectorization and program transformation.  He led the construction of Cedar in 1985, a 32-processor SMP supercomputer built at Illinois.  He was founder of Kuck and Associates and won numerous awards including the Eckert-Mauchly Award from ACM/IEEE and the Charles Babbage Outstanding Scientist Award.  Awards for M.S. and Ph.D. theses are based on quality and impact.

C .L. and J. W.-S. Liu Award
Established by AVANT! Corporation in honor of Professors C. L. (Dave) Liu and Jane W-S. Liu, this award is given in support of a graduate student showing exceptional research promise relatively early in their graduate studies. Qualified candidates must have passed the qualifying exam. 

W. J. Poppelbaum Memorial Award
On the faculty from 1955-1989, Professor Poppelbaum joined the solid state research group under Professor John Bardeen in 1954 and worked on an electrolytic analog of a junction transistor. He joined DCL the next year, and was in charge of circuit research. Hence this award is intended for graduate students in computer hardware or architecture, based on academic merit and creativity. 

Outstanding Computer Science Teaching Assistant Award
This award is given to the overall outstanding teaching assistant for the past year, based both on ranking by students and recognition by faculty. 

Outstanding Teaching Assistants
Each semester, the department recognizes its outstanding TAs.  They are chosen based on recognition by faculty, by considering their supervisor’s evaluation, and by whether their students select them for the incomplete list of teachers ranked as excellent.

Department-Endowed Fellowships

Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Fellowship
This fellowship is intended to encourage exceptional Pakistani students to attend graduate school and to help Pakistan's technological growth, although being Pakistani is not a requirement. It was endowed by Sohaib Abbasi, B.S. 78, M.S. 80, who was formerly senior vice president of the Tools Product Division of Oracle Corporation. 

Richard T. Cheng Fellowship
Richard T. Cheng earned his M.S. in 1969 and Ph.D. in 1971 in computer science from the University of Illinois.  He is chairman and founder of ECI Systems and Engineering, an information technology and integrated systems company headquartered in Virginia Beach, Virginia.  He has established the Richard T. Cheng Fellowship to assist the department in recruiting and retaining exceptional graduate students.

ILLIAC Fellowship
The ILLIAC Fellowships were established from monies provided by the Graduate College to be used in whatever way the Department felt was most beneficial to support its graduate students.  This award was named for the historical ILLIAC projects of the past.  The Fellowship is awarded to incoming graduate students to supplement either a Teaching or Research Assistantship. The awardees may request renewal for an additional 2 years under specific academic progress regulations. 

Andrew and Shana Laursen Fellowship
The Andrew and Shana Laursen Fellowship was established in 2001 to provide meaningful assistance in the recruitment of top graduate students to the Department of Computer Science, and to improve the quality of education and research at the University of Illinois.   

Saburo Muroga Endowed Fellowship
Saburo Muroga earned his Ph.D. at the University of Tokyo in 1958 and visited Illinois that summer while doing research at MIT.  He noticed that the Illinois professors were much nicer to their students and he eventually became a professor here.  Muroga is known for the mentoring of his graduate students.  This fellowship was established by Shigenori Matsushita, a former Toshiba executive, to honor Professor Muroga, with whom he studied in 1962-1963.  It is awarded to outstanding graduate students in computer science. 

Ray Ozzie Fellowship
The Ray Ozzie Fellowship was established in 1996 by Ray Ozzie, BS'79.  Ozzie spent a lot of his time as a CS student programming PLATO, the nation's first computer-based education system.  He was the lead programmer for Lotus Symphony before founding his own company, Iris Associates, where he wrote Lotus Notes. After that, he founded Groove Networks, which was purchased by Microsoft in 2005, where he is currently Chief Software Architect. This fellowship is available to graduate students enrolled in the Department of Computer Science in the College of Engineering. 

Siebel Scholar Fellowship
Siebel Systems, Inc. established the Siebel Scholars Program in April 2000, for students at the world's most prestigious business and computer science schools. Based on academic merit and leadership excellence, five students from each institution are honored as Siebel Scholars every year and receive an award to defray tuition costs and expenses for the second year of their graduate studies.  

Campus and College Fellowships

CS department staff assist all graduate students by nominating and assisting with applications for all funding for which they are eligible.  Selected campus and college awards are listed below.

Support for Underrepresented Groups in Engineering (SURGE) Fellowship
SURGE is a comprehensive package of stipends, service, and activities to recruit persons from under-represented groups into engineering doctoral programs.  The goal to increase the number of persons qualified for engineering faculty and research positions from groups currently under-represented in engineering. 
 

Computational Science and Engineering Fellowship
Each year approximately eight to ten research awards are made to students enrolled in the CSE program. Research projects are selected for support on a competitive basis. Proposals are solicited each Spring for the academic year beginning the following Fall. The proposed research must be interdisciplinary and computationally oriented, and the proposal must be submitted jointly with two CSE faculty members from different disciplines. The CSE Fellows selected receive financial support equivalent to a half-time research assistantship in their home department plus a tuition waiver. CSE Fellows present their research results at the annual CSE Symposium .

Selected Other College and Campus Awards and Fellowships:

• Roy J. Carver Fellowship
• Dissertation Completion Fellowship
• Graduate College Fellowship for Underrepresented Minority Students
• Illinois Distinguished Fellowship
• Ross J. Martin Award

For more awards and fellowships available to CS graduate students, visit:

• College of Engineering
• Graduate College

National Awards & Fellowships

CS department staff assist all graduate students by nominating and assisting with applications for all funding for which they are eligible.  Selected national awards are listed below.

• Fulbright Scholar
• Rhodes Scholar
• NSF Fellowship