Graduate student Aryan Deshwal has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet the world’s top researchers in math and computer science this fall. He plans to ask them how they first thought of their revolutionizing ideas.
“I am very interested in the genealogy of ideas or how important ideas and approaches come from their raw form,” said Deshwal. “I would like to ask the laureates how they figured out some of the most important ideas in their own research careers.”
Deshwal, a PhD student in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, is thought to be the first Washington State University student ever selected to participate in the Heidelberg Laureate Forum. The week-long event is a networking conference in which 200 math and computer science student researchers from around the world spend a week interacting with recipients of the top prizes in those fields, such as the Abel Prize, ACM A.M. Turing Award, ACM Prize in Computing, Fields Medal and the Nevanlinna Prize. The event will be held in Heidelberg in September.
“I feel grateful to be selected to participate in the forum,” Deshwal said. “This forum is a prestigious venue and I believe there are many equally-suitable candidates who deserve the opportunity to attend the event. I feel my selection is only because of all the people who have supported me every day –most important of them being my advisor Jana Doppa who has provided immense help and mentorship throughout my PhD.”
A graduate student at WSU since 2018, Deshwal has been conducting research in novel artificial intelligence algorithms that aim to optimize experiments in high-impact science and engineering applications, including for the development and design of nanoporous materials, pharmaceuticals and vaccines, and computer chips. He has published several peer-reviewed papers and has presented at numerous prestigious conferences, including at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), and the International Conference on Machine Learning.
He was recently named the Voiland College’s outstanding graduate research assistant. He’s worked as an intern at Google Research, Meta Research, and Samsung and holds a bachelor’s degree in math and computing from Delhi Technology University.
“Aryan is a terrific PhD student who has demonstrated excellence in research, teaching, and professional service all at the same time,” said Jana Doppa, George and Joan Berry Distinguished Associate Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Deshwal’s advisor. “He has a long academic research career ahead of him. He is doing exciting, novel, and high impact foundational artificial intelligence (AI) research to solve science and engineering problems to aid environmental sustainability.”
