Today, Microsoft Research Asia announced the awards list of the 2021 Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship Award. 11 excellent PhD candidates from the Asia-Pacific region won the honor. CS Phd candidate Zhang Wangyou (supervised by Assoc. Prof. Qian Yanmin) and Wu Qitian (supervised by Assoc. Prof. Yan Junchi) 

This year, 157 PhD candidates from 50 top universities and institutes in Asia applied for the Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship. Their research areas include computing science, hardware and software system, human and machine intelligence, sensing, recognition, interaction, etc.

The Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship Program identifies the next generation of research leaders through a unique program that offers a combination of mentorship, research, networking, and academic opportunities to promising young candidates. Since its inception in 1999, the program has attracted over one thousand PhD candidates from top universities in the Asia-Pacific region, and 452 outstanding PhD students have been awarded the Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship honor. Fellows have gone on?to become prominent researchers and influential individuals in academia and industry. Fellows earn more than a simple scholarship; they enjoy?long-term close engagement with Microsoft Research Asia, one of the leading computer science research labs in the world.?Each winner has the opportunity to complete an internship, during which they participate in hands-on, advanced research at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, China.

Five Phd students from the CS Department of SJTU won this fellowship and two were nominated for it.