With today’s announcement of the 2005-2006 Intel Foundation Ph.D. Fellowship winners, Stanford has six more prestigious awards under its belt. Each year, the fellowships are granted to about 40 doctoral candidates across the country.

To be considered for the award, applicants’ work must focus on topics that fit Intel’s research and business priorities — namely, increasing Internet and computing accessibility worldwide.

Stanford’s 2005 recipients are Hatice Altug, a graduate student in applied physics; Brian Carlstrom and Michael Houston, graduate students in computer science; Echere Iroaga, a graduate student in management science and engineering; Wendy Ju, a graduate student in mechanical engineering; and David Porter, a graduate student in chemical engineering.

“A total of 43 graduate students across 17 universities were given the awards,” said Brenda Christoffer of Intel’s Higher Education Program, a branch of the corporation dedicated to cultivating future business and technology leaders. “This year, Stanford leads in the number of students receiving this competitive honor.”

More than 20 Stanford graduate students have received Intel Foundation Ph.D. Fellowships since 2000, Christoffer added.

The two-year program includes a stipend for tuition and other fees, a new laptop and an internship at Intel.

“Internships provided are in line with the students’ technical research,” Christoffer wrote in an e-mail to The Daily. “The students are matched with an Intel research, technology or business group at a U.S. site and work with an Intel technologist who mentors the research work. Internships generally last from three to six months.”

While Ju said she will work at Intel this summer, fellows are not required to participate in the internships.

“I will probably not pursue the internship opportunity that is part of the fellowship program,” Carlstrom said. “My group at Stanford already collaborates with several groups at Intel’s Microprocessor Research Laboratory in Santa Clara. If we didn’t already have the chance to work with Intel directly from Stanford, I think I would have taken the internship.”

Whether or not the fellows choose to intern, Intel technologists are available to help them with their research.

This years Stanford fellows said they will investigate a wide variety of topics.

“I’m working on ways to allow programmers to take better advantage of upcoming computer architectures like multi-core central processing units, clusters of central processing units and large supercomputers,” Houston said.

Carlstrom said he plans to use his fellowship for “research in building programming systems for new computer architectures built around transactional memory.”

Houston said that he thinks the most exciting aspect of the fellowship program is the opportunity to work more closely with Intel and receive feedback on his work.

When asked what aspect of the Fellowship he most looked forward to, Carlstrom said, “I should probably say the validation of the importance of my research area to industry or the mentoring opportunity, but I’m most excited to be getting a new laptop.”