Current Fellows

Meet Our Shining Constellation of Rising Stars

Madison Wilson

MADISON WILSON, our inaugural MICS-Qualcomm Hypatia Fellow, is a Ph.D. student in Dr. Duygu Kuzum’s Neuro-electronics lab at UC San Diego. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she earned bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering and neuroscience. 

Her current research combines the two fields through designing 3-dimensional, transparent electrode arrays to study the brain and cortical organoids. 

Madison is extremely active to broaden participation of under-served communities in engineering and technology. She is currently the president of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Graduate Student Council whose mission is to engage the ~1000-person student community through social, professional, and outreach activities. She is also a co-organizer of Escribamos Ciencia, a program promoting scientific English reading and writing skills to bilingual middle schoolers in Baja California through interactive STEM video modules.  As part of Hypatia cohort, she plans to mentor women undergrad and incoming PhD students.  

In her free time, she enjoys planning parties with friends and takes advantage of San Diego weather as much as possible through surfing, hiking, and rock climbing. 

Olivia Weng

OLIVIA WENG is a PhD candidate in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) working with Professor Ryan Kastner at UC San Diego. She received her BS in Computer Science at the University of Chicago, where she worked with Professor Yanjing Li on mitigating cache side-channel attacks and Professor Andrew A. Chien on integrating SSD latency predictors into cloud systems via hardware accelerators. 
 
Her research focuses on using hardware-software co-design to create efficient, fault-tolerant computer architectures for machine learning. Her work has led to collaborations with researchers at AMD as well as high energy physicists at Fermilab and CERN who seek to deploy machine learning at the edge to discover new physics.
 
Olivia has made it a priority to mentor students and serve her community, creating an inclusive computer science environment. She has been a mentor through both UCSD's Graduate Women in Computing Mentorship Program and Jacobs Undergraduate Mentoring Program. She currently serves as the PhD student representative on UCSD's CSE Graduate Committee, sits on CSE's Graduate Student Council, and leads the CSE DEI Book Club. Through her service, her goal is to encourage the department to be more aware and empathetic of their peers' challenges to foster a more inclusive environment, leading to a more productive and free community.

 

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