2026 North America Program Details
We believe that research and development is the key to harnessing the power of imagination and to discovering new possibilities. We are excited to announce a new kind of Fellowship that promotes Qualcomm’s core values of innovation, execution and teamwork. Our goal is to enable students to pursue their futuristic innovative ideas.
2026 North American Winners
Congratulations to the 16 winning teams of Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship North America 2026!
We commend each of the finalists on excellent presentations and quality proposals.
Bing-Yue Wu
Democratizing Chip Design with On-Device Small Language Models as Assistants and Agents
ASU
Atmadip Dey
Democratizing Chip Design with On-Device Small Language Models as Assistants and Agents
ASU
Atharva Raut
Test-Calibrated Thermal Digital Twins for Chiplet 2.5D/3D SoCs
CMU
Je-Wei Chuang
Test-Calibrated Thermal Digital Twins for Chiplet 2.5D/3D SoCs
CMU
Violet (Yinuo) Han
Building Helpful Embodied AI Agents with Long Horizon Understanding
CMU
Weiwei Sun
Building Helpful Embodied AI Agents with Long Horizon Understanding
CMU
Yutong (Kelly) He
Training a Generally Curious Personal Agent: Learning What to Remember and What to Ask
CMU
Fahim Tajwar
Training a Generally Curious Personal Agent: Learning What to Remember and What to Ask
CMU
Kaifeng Zhang
Learning Physics-Informed Visuo-Tactile World Model for Robot Manipulation
Columbia
Binghao Huang
Learning Physics-Informed Visuo-Tactile World Model for Robot Manipulation
Columbia
Jinze Shi
Heterogeneous Electro-optic RF-Optical Front-End for 6G (HERO-6G)
Michigan
Yang Lan
Heterogeneous Electro-optic RF-Optical Front-End for 6G (HERO-6G)
Michigan
Kaiwen He
Making Modern Cryptography Faster and More Energy-Efficient Through Hardware Acceleration of Modular Arithmetic
MIT / CMU
Tianyao Gu
Making Modern Cryptography Faster and More Energy-Efficient Through Hardware Acceleration of Modular Arithmetic
MIT / CMU
Aryaman Gupta
Safety Guardrails for Reasoning in End-to-End Autonomous Driving Foundation Models
Stanford
Sathwik Karnik
Safety Guardrails for Reasoning in End-to-End Autonomous Driving Foundation Models
Stanford
Zizhang Li
Physically Grounded World Modeling through Controllable Visual Generative Models
Stanford
Ziyu Chen
Physically Grounded World Modeling through Controllable Visual Generative Models
Stanford
Muhammad Ahmed Mohsin
State-Space World Models for Intelligent RAN
Stanford
Muhammad Umer
State-Space World Models for Intelligent RAN
Stanford
George Karfakis
Heterogeneous Chiplet-Based Architecture for Fully-Weight-Stationary Compute-in-Memory execution of Billion-Parameter models
UCLA
Samyak Chakrabarty
Heterogeneous Chiplet-Based Architecture for Fully-Weight-Stationary Compute-in-Memory execution of Billion-Parameter models
UCLA
Seth Z. Zhao
Think Deep - Move Fast: Building Vision-Language-Action Model for Generalizable Autonomous Driving with Deep Reasoning and Efficient Action Generation
UCLA
Zewei Zhou
Think Deep - Move Fast: Building Vision-Language-Action Model for Generalizable Autonomous Driving with Deep Reasoning and Efficient Action Generation
UCLA
Sujoy Ghosh
Thermocompression Bonded III-V/Si Integration Platform for Optical, RF/mmWave, and Power Devices
UCLA
Daniel McGovern
Thermocompression Bonded III-V/Si Integration Platform for Optical, RF/mmWave, and Power Devices
UCLA
Annabelle Sujun Tang
Reasoning Compiler: LLM-Guided Optimizations for Efficient Model Serving
UCSD
Christopher Priebe
Reasoning Compiler: LLM-Guided Optimizations for Efficient Model Serving
UCSD
Nilesh Prasad Pandey
K-MEM: Synergizing Agentic Textual Memory with KV-Cache Reuse for Long-Horizon Agents
UCSD
Lanxiang Hu
K-MEM: Synergizing Agentic Textual Memory with KV-Cache Reuse for Long-Horizon Agents
UCSD
Sreevatsank Kadaveru
When Multimodal Sensing Meets the RAN: Sensing-to-Action Autonomy at the Edge
UCSD
Ushasi Ghosh
When Multimodal Sensing Meets the RAN: Sensing-to-Action Autonomy at the Edge
UCSD
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:
Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Finalists' Day
May 28, 2016 | 1:35
