Ojika, a fourth-year computer engineering Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida, was recently notified of his being awarded a $20K Microsoft Azure Research Award. He received his first master’s degree in electrical engineering from California State University Los Angeles and a second in computer engineering from the University of Florida. He is also an XSEDE Student Campus Champion.

Ojika is currently pursuing an internship at Microsoft, working in the company’s research and AI group, and exploring ways of using FPGAs (or programmable accelerators) to further speed up data-intensive applications. After completing his Ph.D., Ojika aims to work with big-data in industry, and serve as research/adjunct faculty at a university where he can continue his cutting-edge work with HPC while educating the next generation of computational scientists.

More information about his career and recent experiences is available here. Additionally, you can find Ojika’s PEARC17 paper titled, “Accelerating High-energy Physics Exploration with Deep Learning,” on the Association for Computing Machinery web site.