Back Issue Archives | Subscribe to Momentum! | K-12 Resources

Intel Taps Star Grad Student for Fellowship

Pavan Kumar Hanumolu did not see or touch a computer until he was 18 years old and studying at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in northern India. One day a friend at the institute took apart a computer, showed Hanumolu a tiny chip inside, and described what happened within that chip.

Hanumolu was captivated and knew immediately what he wanted to study.

Now 27 years old, he is a standout PhD candidate in the OSU School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS) where he recently won a highly competitive and prestigious Intel Fellowship, one of only 35 awarded annually by Intel to students the company deems "the best of the best" at select U.S. universities. The fellowship is worth more than $42,000 and provides a year's tuition, a living stipend, a new Intel® Centrino™ brand notebook, plus an Intel mentor.

"Recipients of this award are typically from the top-10 universities such as Stanford, MIT, and Berkeley," says Hanumolu's advisor, OSU associate professor Un-Ku Moon. "This fact highlights Pavan's exceptional potential. He's an exemplary individual who brings prestige and recognition not only to himself, but also to our analog and mixed-signal program."

Although Hanumolu now knows more than most people ever will about computers and the complex process of chip design, he is still in awe of the technology that drew him in the day he saw his first computer chip."It still amazes me how these things work," he says, describing the highly complex nature of computer chips. "In fact, I'm amazed they work at all."

Hanumolu's dream is to one day apply his knowledge of chip design in the field of biomedicine. He envisions, for example, how bio-sensor chips will one day help diabetics wirelessly monitor their blood sugar levels and automatically administer insulin as needed.

"Biomedicine is an application of this technology that I think is very useful," he says, stating that his ultimate goal is to improve the world.

At OSU, Hanumolu is researching ways to solve a thorny problem that plagues the entire computer industry. Although computer chips are faster than ever, the overall processing speed is determined by how fast data can be pushed back and forth along the lines that connect the CPU to the memory. This is also a problem on the larger scale of networked computers. These lines create a data bottleneck and when data is pushed too fast, the data itself can be altered. Finding a way around that is a challenge, Hanumolu says. But at OSU he is innovating creative chip designs that "outsmart" the problem by anticipating how data might be altered and reversing that action along the way.

Ever modest and very polite, Hanumolu brushes off his research accomplishments and the awards he's won. "I'm just lucky," he says. "I have been in the right place at the right time."

The OSU College of Engineering is one of those right places, he says.

"Oregon State has been an extremely good experience for me," he says. "I have a lot of freedom, the people are very good, and the research is exciting."