Yahoo! Honors Big Thinking PhD Students Through Inaugural Fellowship Program

The verdict is in for the Yahoo! 2007-2008 PhD Student Fellowship Program. Five exceptional PhD students have been selected to receive prestigious Yahoo! fellowships in the program’s inaugural year.

Supporting the academic community is a top priority at Yahoo!. The Yahoo! PhD Student Fellowship Program was created to recognize outstanding graduate student researchers who we believe have exceptional potential to make significant contributions and become thought leaders in their research fields.

We received an overwhelming number of outstanding applications, and the competition was very keen. Based on our desire to support research in new scientific areas that will deliver next generation Internet technology to our users, we selected the following student researchers as recipients of 2007-08 PhD Student Fellowships (in alphabetical order):

Lars Backstrom, Cornell University

Andrew Carlson, Carnegie Mellon University

Abhimanyu Lad, Carnegie Mellon University

Qiaozhu Mei, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Hamid Nazerzadeh, Stanford University

The highlights of each recipient’s award benefits include full tuition and fees for two academic years, a $1,000 gift to the recipient’s academic department, an optional summer internship, and a chance to collaborate with our distinguished scientists.

We were extremely impressed with the all of the applicants and would like to thank each student and professor who applied to the program this year.