MIT CSAIL graduate student Mingran Yang was recently awarded the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship for her systems and networking research. The company’s fellowship program works to globally identify and empower “the next generation of exceptional computing research talent.”
“As a system researcher, I am always driven by the passion for building effective and efficient computer systems for better education, health care, and social life,” says Yang. “The Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship is a great recognition of my previous work. It motivates me to continue solving challenging problems, make a real-world impact, and contribute to the entire community."
Yang’s research focuses on novel architectural design for large-scale network systems, where she aims to address the limitations of current programmable switch architecture and enable emerging data-intensive cloud applications. More recently, Yang was a lead author on a paper discussing a programmable chipset called “Trio” that was used in some of Juniper Networks’ routers and switches. Yang’s research demonstrated that Trio outperforms current pipeline-based solutions by up to 1.8 times, illustrating its mitigation abilities while performing in-network aggregation.
She is a student of MIT professor and CSAIL principal investigator Manya Ghobadi, who has developed technologies later utilized in both Microsoft and Google’s real-world systems. As for Yang’s breakthroughs, she was previously awarded the MIT Presidential Fellowship for her systems and networking studies. With the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship, she will continue to focus on high-performance computing.
