Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship

Two Indian Americans are among the first five recipients of the Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship Award, a new program that honors early-career university professors who demonstrate exceptional talent for novel research and leadership in their disciplines.The recipients are Subhash Khot, whose theoretical computer science work at Georgia Tech focuses on designing efficient algorithms, and Radhika Nagpal, whose research at Harvard concerns how biological approaches can be applied to distributed systems.Khot’s research at Tech’s College of Computing tackles fundamental questions regarding which problems can and cannot be solved quickly on a computer. The questions Khot addresses in his work often have deep connections to diverse areas in mathematics, logic, cryptography and computer science.Nagpal, who began teaching at Harvard University in September 2004, teaches an undergraduate programming course as well as a graduate course on biologically-inspired approaches to distributed systems and multi-agent systems. The latter corresponds to her research interest, which lies in engineering self-organizing and self-repairing systems, and in better understanding robust collective behavior in biological systems.