The IBM PhD Fellowship Awards Program was initiated in the 1950s to recognize and support outstanding graduate students who have an interest in solving problems that are important to IBM and fundamental to innovation in many academic disciplines and areas of study. Like every year, many nominations were received for the intensely competitive worldwide program for the academic years of 2020-2021 and 2021-2022. Finally, IBM has announced the list of awardees; among the recipients is Atri Bhattacharyya, Doctoral Assistant at EPFL’s School of Computer and Communication Sciences.

Atri joined EPFL in 2016 and completed his MS in Computer Science in 2018. Since then, he has worked at EPFL in the areas of microarchitectural security and design, and datacenter architectures. Through his years at EPFL, Atri has worked under the supervision of Prof. Babak Falsafi, Prof. Paolo Ienne, and Prof. M. Payer, completing many projects along the way. His research on a speculative-execution attack using port contention as a side-channel was published in the Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. He is also the winner of many awards, including Best Research Presentation Award (2019) and EPFL IC School Fellowship (2018).

The IBM PhD Fellowship will be a major boost for Atri’s academic career because of the international recognition associated with the prestigious award. The fellowship includes a competitive stipend for living expenses, travel and to attend conferences for the two academic years. IBM will also match an IBM Mentor with the technical interests of each recipient.

We felicitate Atri Bhattacharyya on his achievement and hope that the IBM PhD Fellowship will lead him to pioneering work and thereby make his mark in promising and disruptive technologies of the future.