Washington University's Yixin Chen receives prestigious Microsoft award

Just 1 of 5 nationally

Yixin Chen, Ph.D., assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, is one of just five new faculty nationwide to receive a New Faculty Fellowship from Microsoft Research.

The fellowship is one of the most prestigious awards for young computer scientists. Chen, who began his Washington University career in 2005, is the first Washington University researcher to be awarded the Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship. It provides each recipient $200,000 in cash and other resources such as software and conference travel and the opportunity to engage in research with Microsoft personnel over two years.

The New Faculty Fellowship Program, now in its third year of operation and administered by Microsoft Research’s External Research & Programs group as part of its mission to support and collaborate with the academic community, is designed to identify and assist exceptional first-, second-, and third-year professors who are advancing the state of the art of computer-science research.

Every university in the nation can nominate just one candidate. Microsoft selects 25 semi-finalists, from which a field of ten is chosen. Those ten are flown to Microsoft Research’s Redmond, Wash. Campus, where they give a five-minute presentation in front of a mixed panel of famous computer scientists, three from Microsoft and three from academia. They then participate in a five-minute question-and-answer session. The panel chooses five.

Chen’s research interest for which he won the Fellowship is the problem of nonlinear optimization. Solving it can bring many applications to automated planning, medical operations such as radiotherapy, computational biology and engineering design. For five years he worked on developing an algorithm that today can solve a nonlinear optimization problem that once took a 100-node parallel computer a week to solve in just 100 seconds.