---
markdown_generated_at: "2026-10-14"
title: "QIF 2026 Europe"
url: "https://www.qualcomm.com/research/university-relations/innovation-fellowship/2026-europe"
description: "Apply for the 2026  Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship for the Europe. Application details, participating universities, and areas of interest."
---

# QIF 2026 Europe

# 2026 Europe Program Details

In 2012, Qualcomm Research established a fellowship program in Europe following the successful model in the U.S. For 2026 the program in Europe will be run as a single competition where students from all invited universities in Europe compete. Each winning student receives a fellowship in the amount of $40,000 for the upcoming academic year and is assigned a Qualcomm researcher as a mentor to facilitate close collaboration and interaction with Qualcomm’s corporate research center.

- Finalists
- Application Process
- Participating Universities
- Areas of Interest
- Timeline

After careful consideration, we decided to select the following 18 proposals for finalist presentation. Congratulations to the students that qualified!

| Student Name | University | Innovation Title | Supervisors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amin Abdulrahman | Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy | Side-Channel-Secure Post-Quantum Crypto on an Open-Source Silicon Root of Trust | Peter Schwabe |
| Zhuo Chen | University of Birmingham | Touch from Appearance: Learning Comprehensive Object Physics for Human-Like Robotic Manipulation | Hyung Jin Chang, Aleš Leonardis |
| Yupeng Chen | University of Oxford | Establishing Safe Protocols for Agent-X Interactions | Adel Bibi, Philip Torr |
| Martin Fink | Technical University of Munich | Provable Security for JIT Compilers | Pramod Bhatotia |
| Hanna Foerster | University of Cambridge | Toward Secure-By-Default Computer Use Agents | Robert Mullins |
| Mar Gonzàlez I Català | University of Cambridge | A Geometric Theory of Autoregressive Reasoning | Pietro Liò |
| Jiajun He | University of Cambridge | Robust Diffusion Model Control for Multiple-Constraint Inverse Problems with Replica Exchange | José Miguel Hernández-Lobato |
| Tom Jacobs | CISPA | Controlling Implicit Regularization for Sparse Transformers | Rebekka Burkholz |
| Tobias Kovats | ETH Zürich | Finding Microarchitectural Leakage in Concurrent Systems Before Tapeout | Kaveh Razavi |
| Zongqian Li | University of Cambridge | Scaling Agent Skills and Cowork Environments: Training Generalized On-Device Agents via Reinforcement Learning | Nigel Collier |
| Diganta Misra | Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems | Hodge-Regularized GRASP for Noisy Preference Post-Training | Antonio Orvieto |
| Abhinandan Pal | University of Birmingham | Neural Model Checking for Hardware Verification | Mirco Giacobbe |
| Jeroen Robben | KU Leuven | Towards Practical Stateful Fuzzing of Network Protocol Implementations | Mathy Vanhoef |
| Naila Sebastián Esandi | INRIA | A Theoretical Framework for Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learning | Vianney Perchet |
| Wenfang Sun | University of Amsterdam | Trustworthy Video Agents on a Budget: Multi-Round Reasoning with Physics-Grounded World Models | Cees G.M. Snoek |
| Christopher Wewer | Max Planck Institute for Informatics | Towards Scene State Tokenization for World Models | Bernt Schiele, Jan Eric Lenssen |
| Xianghui Xie | University of Tübingen | From Videos to Policies: Autonomous Robot Learning from Human Demonstrations | Gerard Pons-Moll |
| Jiaxu Xing | ETH Zürich | Learning Self-Improving Robotic Control Policies in the Real World | Davide Scaramuzza |

# Fellowship Winners and Finalists

The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship began in 2009, and has continued to grow with the addition of more universities, more candidates, and expansion to our research centers internationally. Take a look at a list of all our fellowship winners and finalists from years past:

[Winners](https://www.qualcomm.com/research/university-relations/innovation-fellowship/winners)

[Finalists](https://www.qualcomm.com/research/university-relations/innovation-fellowship/finalists)