Computer Science Ph.D. student wins National Physical Science Consortium graduate fellowship

Andrew Keep, a second year Ph.D. student in the School of Informatics, has been named the recipient of the highly competitive and prestigious National Physical Science Consortium (NPSC) graduate fellowship.

Andrew will be sponsored by the National Security Agency (NSA) for his work on Ruby, a dynamically-typed, pure object-oriented programming language. His work focuses on improving Ruby’s performance, through compiler and optimization techniques, such as specialization. He also hopes to investigate parallel programming in Ruby, using Ruby’s domain specific language idioms to experiment with parallel programming models. The NPSC fellowship will allow him more time to focus on his dissertation research. The fellowship will begin in the fall and run for six years from the start of his Ph.D. program. As part of the fellowship, Keep will receive a stipend, health insurance, a tuition waiver and the opportunity to spend two summers working at NSA.

“Andrew should be commended for this accomplishment,” said computer science chair Andy Hanson. “To be awarded this fellowship is a testament to the work he’s been doing here, and the kind of exceptional student he is.”

“The work that Andrew has been doing with me on developing compiler techniques to optimize Ruby is groundbreaking. It beautifully complements other effort in the Ruby community to enhance Ruby’s performance and has the potential for far reaching impact, through published papers as well as the Ruby compiler that Andrew plans to release under an open source license,” said Arun Chauhan, professor of computer science.

The National Physical Science Consortium is a unique partnership between industry, government agencies and laboratories, and higher education. Established in 1987, the NPSC is headquartered in Los Angeles.

The NPSC has one primary objective, and that is to increase the number of qualified U.S.-citizen Ph.D.’s in the physical sciences and related engineering fields, emphasizing recruitment of a diverse applicant pool of women and historically underrepresented minorities. NPSC accomplishes this objective by assisting corporations and government agencies and laboratories in awarding doctoral fellowships to outstanding U.S. students.