This year, Red Hat has become a part of the IBM PhD Fellowship program, an award program that recognizes PhD students who demonstrate both academic excellence and exceptional innovation in their research proposals. The 2021 program received hundreds of applications from 183 universities in 32 countries. 

As part of our participation, Red Hat experts helped select the best candidates from a pool of applicants as part of the cloud and machine learning panel. Three candidates in this area were chosen, focusing on three topics: improving system performance, clean-slate operating systems in Rust, and federated learning.

The benefits of the IBM PhD Fellowship Awards include funding for PhD students in the final years of their programs, as well as access to mentors from both IBM and Red Hat, in addition to their academic lead. For example, Red Hatter Uli Drepper will be working with University of California, Irvine student Vikram Narayanan, whose recent work in RedLeaf, a clean-slate operating system in Rust, explores the possibility of abandoning hardware-based isolation in favor of language-based mechanisms—thereby changing the course of operating system design.

The IBM PhD Fellowship program is an intensely competitive worldwide program focused on PhD students looking to make their mark in promising and disruptive technologies. Students must be nominated by a doctoral faculty member. Nominations for the annual IBM PhD Fellowship program begin the third week of September and are accepted for five weeks. Find out more at research.ibm.com/university/awards/fellowships.html.