The Facebook Fellowship program provides awards to PhD candidates conducting research on important topics across computer science and engineering, such as computer vision, programming languages, computational social science, and more. Recipients of the award receive tuition and fees paid for up to two academic years and a stipend of $42,000, which includes conference travel support.

The Fellows are also invited to Facebook HQ in Menlo Park to attend the annual Fellowship Summit. This summit serves as an opportunity for Fellows to network with the rest of their cohort, share their research, and learn more about what researchers at Facebook are working on. As in 2020, we will host the summit virtually this year.

The program is now in its 10th year and has supported more than 144 PhD candidates from a broad range of universities. This year, we received 2,163 applications from over 100 universities worldwide, and we selected 26 outstanding Fellows from 19 universities.

Congratulations to this year’s winners, and thank you to everyone who took the time to submit an application.

2021 Facebook Fellows

Applied statistics

Hsiang Hsu
Harvard University

Finalists: Ayush Jain, University of California San Diego; Hanyu Song, Duke University

AR/VR photonics and optics

Prachi Thureja
California Institute of Technology

Finalists: Nathan Tessema Ersumo, University of California, Berkeley; Geun Ho Ahn, Stanford University; Christina Maria Spaegele, Harvard University

AR/VR future technologies

Logan Clark
University of Virginia

Caitlin Morris
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Finalists: Dishita Turakhia, MIT; Adam Williams, Colorado State University; Feiyu Lu, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech)

Blockchain and cryptoeconomics

Yan Ji
Cornell University

Finalists: Vibhaalakshmi Sivaraman, MIT; Itay Tsabary, Technion — Israel Institute of Technology

Computational social science

Manoel Horta Ribeiro
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Finalists: Kelsey Gonzalez, University of Arizona; Marianne Aubin Le Quere, Cornell University

AR/VR computer graphics

Cheng Zhang
University of California, Irvine

Liang Shi
MIT

Finalist: Joey Litalien, McGill University

Computer vision

Shuang Li
MIT

Xingyi Zhou
University of Texas at Austin

Finalists: Xinshuo Weng, Carnegie Mellon University; Yunzhu Li, MIT; Jiayuan Mao, MIT; Yinpeng Dong, Tsinghua University

Distributed systems

Yunhao Zhang
Cornell University

Finalists: Vikram Narayanan, University of California, Irvine; Ahmed Alquraan, University of Waterloo

Economics and computation

Andrés Ignacio Cristi Espinosa
Universidad de Chile

Finalist: Hanrui Zhang, Duke University

Networking

Jiaxin Lin
University of Wisconsin–Madison

Finalists: Siva Kesava Reddy Kakarla, University of California, Los Angeles; Junzhi Gong, Harvard University; Fabian Ruffy Varga, New York University (NYU)

Programming languages

Yuanbo Li
Georgia Institute of Technology

Finalists: Jenna Wise, Carnegie Mellon University; Victor A. Ying, MIT

Security and privacy

Jiaheng Zhang
University of California, Berkeley

Marina Minkin
University of Michigan

Finalists: Lillian Yow Tsai, MIT; Praneeth Vepakomma, MIT; Alexander Bienstock, NYU; Amrita Roy Chowdhury, University of Wisconsin–Madison; Trishita Tiwari, Cornell University; Harjasleen Malvai, Cornell University; Jiameng Pu, Virginia Tech

Database systems

Leonhard Spiegelberg
Brown University

Jialin Ding
MIT

Finalists: Tobias Ziegler, Technical University of Darmstadt; Ian Neal, University of Michigan; Pedro Thiago Timbó Holanda, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica; Avinash Kumar, University of California, Irvine

Systems for machine learning

Weizhe Hua
Cornell University

Finalist: Qinyi Luo, University of Southern California

Instagram/Facebook app well-being and safety

Yasaman Sadat Sefidgar
University of Washington

Finalists: Nicholas Santer, University of California, Santa Cruz; Brian Ward Bauer, University of Southern Mississippi; Morgan Klaus Scheuerman, University of Colorado Boulder

Privacy and data use

Reza Ghaiumy Anaraky
Clemson University

Finalist: Yixin Zou, University of Michigan

Machine learning

Mikhail Khodak
Carnegie Mellon University

Yuval Dagan
MIT

Natural language processing

Tiago Pimentel Martins da Silva
University of Cambridge

Kawin Ethayarajh
Stanford University

Finalists: Haoyue “Freda” Shi, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago; Tom McCoy, Johns Hopkins University

Spoken language processing and audio classification

Paul Pu Liang
Carnegie Mellon University

Finalists: Jonah Casebeer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Efthymios Tzinis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Karan Ahuja, Carnegie Mellon University

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To learn more about application requirements and program details, visit the Facebook Fellowship Program page.