UC Davis graduate student Vincent Josua Hellendoorn is among the diverse group of ten fellows accepted to the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship Program for the 2018-2019 academic year, Microsoft’s research organization announced earlier this month.

Vincent, a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science program at UC Davis, is working on research that applies models that were originally designed for natural languages to source code to better understand the characteristics of real-world software. His work improves these (typically deep learning) models by integrating insights from software engineering research and programming language design. The resulting models are used to build tools that can assist developers in common, but taxing software engineering tasks like fault detection and API discovery.

“These are incredibly talented students, the top students from across North America,” said Bill Dolan, a principal researcher and research manager at Microsoft’s research lab in Redmond, Washington, who directs the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship Program.

The program provides 100 percent of tuition and fees for two consecutive academic years and an annual stipend of $28,000 plus $4,000 annually for professional conferences and seminars. All fellows are also offered the opportunity to interview for an internship with leading Microsoft researchers who are working on cutting-edge projects related to their fields of study.

The fellowship program was established in 2008 to promote the careers of promising students in computer science, mathematics and electrical engineering. Since the inception, the program has supported 122 fellows, many who have gone on to perform pioneering research in the technology industry or accept faculty appointments at universities around the world.

The 2018 winners of the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship include: The 2018 winners of the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship include: Iretiayo Akinola, Columbia University; Naama Ben-David, Carnegie Mellon University; Vincent Josua Hellendoorn, University of California, Davis; Vikram Iyer, University of Washington; Natalie Klco, University of Washington; Manish Raghavan, Cornell University; Julia Romanski, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Haijun Xia, University of Toronto; Dong Xie, University of Utah; Justine Zhang, Cornell University.

Learn more about the  Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship Program by visiting the Microsoft website.