News | December 15, 2025

Professor Aydogan Ozcan elected to the European Academy of Sciences and Arts

Congratulations to Professor Aydogan Ozcan who has been elected to the European Academy of Sciences and Arts for his major contributions to mobile sensing, computational imaging, microscopy and medical diagnostics.

He is widely recognized in his field, with honors from Optica, SPIE and the International Commission for Optics. He is also a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the US Academy of Inventors, holds more than 85 patents, and has co-founded 3 start-ups.

The European Academy of Sciences and Arts, founded in 1990 and including many Nobel laureates, elected Professor Ozcan to its technical and environmental sciences cohort.

Please see the news release.

Professor CK Ken Yang elected as a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology

Congratulations to Professor Yang who has been elected as a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). Fellowship of the IET is the highest level of professional recognition offered to celebrate engineers, technologists, and innovators who have made significant contributions to their field, organization, or society.

UCLA Alum Jafar Savoj Elevated to IEEE Fellow

UCLA alum Jafar Savoj has been named an IEEE Fellow effective 1 January 2026, being recognized for contributions to the design of high-speed wireline transceiver circuits and systems.

Dr Savoj received his PhD in EE at UCLA in 2001 and is now the Director of Engineering at Apple.

The grade of Fellow is conferred upon IEEE Senior Members with outstanding records of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. Each year, this honor is limited to no more than 0.1% of the total IEEE voting membership. Fellow is the highest grade of IEEE membership and is recognized as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement.

UCLA CHIPS Celebrates 10 Years at the 5th Annual CHIPS Symposium

The Fifth Annual UCLA CHIPS Symposium, held on December 4, 2025, was a tremendous success, bringing together a full audience of faculty, students, industry leaders, and government partners to celebrate the center’s 10-year anniversary and its influential role in advancing heterogeneous integration and semiconductor packaging. Under the vision and leadership of Professor Subramanian Iyer, Director of UCLA CHIPS, the event showcased a decade of progress driven by his efforts in shaping the research agenda, mentoring students, and building a strong ecosystem of academic–industry collaboration. The symposium featured engaged technical sessions, vibrant discussions, and exceptional networking, while also honoring the legacy of Professor King-Ning Tu and highlighting the achievements of CHIPS graduates across the semiconductor landscape. Anchored by the theme “Scale-Down and Scale-Out of Advanced Packaging,” the program included compelling presentations from Micron, GlobalFoundries, the Texas Institute for Electronics, Amkor, Synopsys, and UCLA’s newest faculty member, Professor Tiwei Wei, along with a dynamic NAPMP panel moderated by Professor Boris Vaisband. The day concluded with a highly successful student poster session hosted by Kulicke & Soffa—one of the most energetic in CHIPS history—featuring breakthrough research in wafer-scale systems, 3D stacking, TSVs, thermal management, and heterogeneous assembly, further underscoring the growth and national impact of UCLA CHIPS under Professor Iyer’s direction.

Ozcan Lab published a New Paper on Intelligent Photodetectors that ‘Sniff and Seek’ like Retriever Dogs

In collaboration with UC Berkeley, Ozcan Lab published a new paper in Science on a new type of intelligent photodetectors that ‘sniff and seek’ like retriever dogs, recognizing materials directly from light spectra.

Please see the paper and press release.

Ozcan’s Mobile Microscopy Highlighted Among UCLA’s Top 10 Innovations

Ozcan’s research on mobile microscopy has been highlighted as one of the 10 Bruin inventions and research discoveries that have powered progress.

Please see the press release.

Seminars

Calls for proposals

Call for Proposals: TSMC-NYCU 2026 Grand Challenges

Primary Objective:
The primary objective of the NYCU x tsmc 2026 Grand Challenges (inc. multi-year Big League,..) and ARP program is to develop advanced semiconductor materials, processes, integration, devices, packaging, and design technologies that support the future development of energy-efficient cloud and edge AI chips and 3Dx3D superchips.

Pre-Proposal:
The proposal should be submitted by a team of two to three professors. The first stage will be submitted in the form of a pre-proposal for review, in the format as per the attachment. The pre-proposal should outline a plan for addressing Grand Challenges in the AI era within the next three years. The content should include: team members, research topic, research abstract (including linkage to the program’s primary objective), and major innovations. The overlap with existing projects sponsored by tsmc should be avoided. Research topics include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

Device: Novel high-energy efficiency next-generation transistors and underpinning materials, processes, and fundamental mechanism modeling

Memory: Emerging memory device (material, cell array), memory for generative AI

Interconnect: low resistance metal and low k material

Packaging: Novel materials (e.g. for large dimension and multi-layer heterogeneous 3Dx3D superchips, stress/warpage management, .. ), Heat dissipation, advanced substrate and manufacturing, system architecture for AI and high-performance computing

Design: Design technology co-optimization, High-throughput power-efficient machine learning accelerator design, Power delivery and management circuits in SoC, 3D, and heterogeneous integration, Next-gen high-speed high-bandwidth connectivity innovations

Specialty: Sensors and IoT, Si Photonics

Process: Novel materials (topological metal, low dimension, high thermal conductance,..etc ) and advanced process (e.g., selective growth, gap fill ..etc.)

POC (Proof of Concept) test vehicles and feasibility studies in later years of multi-year projects for short-loop or integrated flow demonstration are encouraged.

Timeline and Selection:
Pre-proposals Abstract (up to 2 pages) must be submitted to Ms. Jiang at drj@nycu.edu.tw by January 6, 2026. Invitations to the second-stage Big-League proposal will be determined based on the quality of the pre-proposal and its alignment with the overall Big-League theme. High-quality submissions that do not fit the Big-League framework will be recommended for the TSMC 2027 ARP Program.

Course Offerings

Student Organizations

Submit your research & get published in UCLA’s Undergraduate Science Journal (Volume 39)

Hello Bruins!

Have you completed a research course at UCLA (SRP 199, 198, URSP, URFP) or a summer program like Amgen scholars, that required you to write a final paper? Or have you written a manuscript or thesis as part of your undergraduate research? If so, your work may be eligible for publication in Volume 39 of the Undergraduate Science Journal (USJ), UCLA’s premier student-run STEM research journal! We welcome submissions from undergraduates across all STEM disciplines who have conducted research at UCLA or
under the mentorship of a UCLA faculty member.

SUBMIT HERE! (https://forms.gle/jEQM7HWzHtNSWYgG7)

Priority Submission Deadline: Sunday, December 14, 2025 at 11:59 PM PST
Final Submission Deadline: Wednesday, January 7, 2026 at 11:59 PM PST

Publishing with USJ is a great way to share your work with the UCLA scientific community and strengthen your research profile for graduate school, medical school, or industry opportunities!

We look forward to reading your work!

Job Opportunities

Carnegie Mellon University – ECE Faulty Position

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University invites applications for tenure-track, research-track, and teaching-track faculty positions at all ranks on our Pittsburgh campus. Although we welcome applicants in all areas of ECE, this year we are particularly interested in candidates whose research focuses on machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Our top-ranked department offers a highly collaborative environment, world-class research infrastructure, and strong support for interdisciplinary scholarship. Applicants should hold a PhD in a relevant field. Application review will begin shortly and will continue until the positions are filled.

Faculty application link: https://apply.interfolio.com/174597
When applying, please also email Andrea Zanette at zanette@cmu.edu

Carnegie Mellon University – PhD Recruitment

Carnegie Mellon University is recruiting several new PhD students this cycle, on reasoning, agentic AI, and diffusion LLMs.

PhD application link (Deadline Dec 15): https://www.ece.cmu.edu/admissions/graduate-application-deadlines.html

When applying, please email Andrea Zanette at zanette@cmu.edu.

Hiring PhD Interns/FTE for Training and Inference of Foundation Models in AWS Neuron Science

From Amazon Web Services Neuron Science:

Our team in AWS AI Research is looking for a couple of PhD FTE/interns passionate about advancing fundamental research in foundation models. Our algorithm team focuses on developing innovative solutions in the topic of Algorithm-System for LLMs (efficient model design, training, inference) LLM-for-System (LLMs and agents that write optimized kernels). These efforts require both a strong theoretical foundation and a practical understanding of topics such as foundation modeling, distributed optimization, model compression, and machine learning systems. We work closely with system researchers to ensure our algorithmic solutions are compatible with system and hardware constraints, training and testing end2end in accuracy and speed. At the same time, the algorithmic innovation we bring can contribute improving systems and future hardware feature to incorporate.

Basic Qualifications

Hands-on experience with large language models (LLMs), including:
- Model architecture, datasets, evaluation metrics, and pre-/post-training techniques
- Distributed training techniques, such as parallelism, mixed-precision methods, optimizers, stochastic rounding, and IO-aware training
- Compression and inference strategies, including pruning, quantization, and speculative decoding
- Post-training of SFT and RL to enhance reasoning capability
- Leveraging LLM to improve ML system and kernel programming
Eager to learn effective system kernel implementation if needed
Enrolled PhD student in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field
First authored papers in top venues like NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML.

Preferred Qualifications

Strong theoretical background, such as distributed optimization, compression, or RL
Strong hands-on experience on pre-training (e.g., low-precision training) or post-training (e.g., SFT, RLHF, GRPO)
Proven experience with foundation models, including LLMs, multi-modal models
Experience in establishing scaling laws for training and inference time-scaling
Knowledge of distributed systems and experience developing low-level, high-performant kernels

Selected Publications

This year, our team has published multiple papers that bridge the gap between theory and practice in LLM research. We also actively collaborate with system and hardware engineers across the AWS organization to deliver tutorials. Below is a list of recent publications:

[Under review] MuonBP: Faster Muon via Block-Periodic Orthogonalization Arxiv
[Under review] Scaling Laws Meet Model Architecture: Toward Inference-Efficient LLMs Arxiv
[Under review] TritonRL: Training LLMs to Think and Code Triton Without Cheating Arxiv
[Under review] Demystifying Transition Matching: When and Why It Can Beat Flow Matching Arxiv
[Under review] Not-a-Bandit: Provably No-Regret Drafter Selection in Speculative Decoding for LLMs Arxiv
[IJCAI 2025] Tutorial: Scaling LLM Training: Efficient Pre-training & Fine-tuning on AI Accelerators
[AISTATS 2025] Training LLMs with MXFP4 Paper
[AISTATS 2025] Stochastic Rounding for LLM Training: Theory and Practice Paper
[ICML 2025] ProxSparse – Regularized Learning of Semi-Structured Sparsity Masks for Pretrained LLMs Paper
[ICML 2025] RoSTE – An Efficient Quantization-Aware Supervised Fine-Tuning Approach Paper
[ICML 2025] WaveletToken – Enhancing Foundation Models for Time Series Forecasting via Wavelet-based Tokenization Paper
[ICML 2024] Collage: Light-Weight Low-Precision Strategy for LLM Training Paper
[ICML 2024] Variance-reduced Zeroth-Order Methods for Fine-Tuning Language Models Paper
[ICML 2024] MADA: Meta-Adaptive Optimizers through Hyper-gradient Descent Paper
[ICML 2024] EMC^2: Efficient MCMC Negative Sampling for Contrastive Learning with Global Convergence Paper
[NeurIPS 2024] Posterior Sampling with a Diffusion Prior for Online Learning Paper
[IEEE BigData 2024] HLAT: High-quality Large Language Model Pre-trained on AWS Trainium Paper
[KDD 2024] Survey: Inference Optimization of Foundation Models on AI Accelerators Paper
[KDD 2024] Tutorial: Inference Optimization of Foundation Models for AI Accelerators
[KDD 2023] Tutorial: Training Large-scale Foundation Models on Emerging AI Chips

We also collaborate more system-oriented topics like publications below

[MLSys 2025] Marconi: Prefix Caching for the Era of Hybrid LLM Paper
[MLSys 2025] ScaleFusion: Scalable Inference of Spatial-Temporal Diffusion Transformers for High-Resolution Long Video Generation Paper
[MLSys 2025] FastTree: Optimizing Attention Kernel and Runtime for Tree-Structured LLM Inference Paper

If you are excited to push the boundaries of foundation model research and make impactful contributions, we would love to hear from you! We also constantly hire full-time PhDs. Please send your CV to Youngsuk Park pyoungsu@amazon.com | youngsuk@cs.stanford.edu (cc Kaan Ozkara kaanozka@amazon.com) with a short paragraph of your interest.

TSMC Global Summer Internship Program

LADWP Student Engineer Program- Summer 2026 Internship

LADWP is currently accepting applications for its Summer 2026 Student Engineer Program (SEP). The goal of the SEP is to provide college engineering students with experiential job training opportunities, including career mentoring, theoretical and technical instruction, and project related infrastructure work tasks. Student Engineers will be paired with LADWP engineers and work in technical teams within the organization’s Water, Power, and Joint systems. The SEP eligibility requirements and employment application are available at: http://www.ladwp.com/sep.

Starting pay for Student Engineers is approximately $32 per hour.
The application window closes Sunday, January 4, 2026.
The Summer SEP begins no earlier than May 1 and ends no later than September 30.
BS and MS students are welcome
Must be a United States citizen or permanent resident (Green Card holder), or have the legal right to work permanently in the United States.

Successful applicants will be notified of their selection between January and March 2026. Work assignments will be arranged to commence upon the conclusion of the student’s academic year. For questions about the program, please send an email to studentengineer@ladwp.com.

Full Time Faculty Position – Physics Department USM

The Physics Department of the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (UTFSM or USM, for short) is seeking to hire a full-time Academic who will be expected to teach undergraduate and graduate courses in the area of Experimental Physics.

Please see this link for more information regarding this position.

Postdoctoral Researcher: Modeling and Stability Analysis for Modern Power Systems

Please see this link for more information regarding this position.

Researcher II/III: EMT Modeling, Simulation and Analysis for Large-Scale Power Systems

Please see this link for more information regarding this position.

Part time Project with Professor Pirouz Kavehpour

We’re seeking an expert developer for a project‑based engagement (not hourly) to build and optimize scalable applications, deploy on Azure Cloud, and integrate GPU‑accelerated embedding software. This role requires deep technical expertise, independence, and the ability to deliver high‑quality solutions within defined project milestones.

What You’ll Work On

GPU Embedding Service (Containerized)—FastAPI (Python), ML/embeddings, Docker + NVIDIA Container Toolkit, Azure GPU (VM/AKS/ACI), CI/CD with Azure Container Registry (ACR).
Triage Pipeline with DB & Integrations—Node.js/TypeScript (workers/cron), PostgreSQL (SQL, locks), REST API integration, Azure services (Blob, AI Search, Webhooks).
Website Integration & Admin UI—Next.js 15 (App Router, API routes, Server Actions), TypeScript + React, PostgreSQL queries, UI/UX for job tables & status.

Requirements

Expertise in Next.js 15, Node.js, TypeScript, React, and PostgreSQL.
Hands‑on experience deploying to Azure (preferably using ACR, AKS/ACI, Web Apps, andmanaged services).
Proficiency with containerized GPU workflows (Docker, NVIDIA Container Toolkit).
Strong understanding of REST APIs, background workers/cron, SQL performance (indexes,
locks), and secure auth patterns.
Track record of independently delivering production‑grade solutions on schedule and tospec.

Nice to Have

FastAPI and Python ML/embeddings experience.
Azure AI Search, Blob, and Webhooks integrations.
CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps).
Admin UI/Design System experience for operational dashboards.

How We Work
Project‑based milestones, clear acceptance criteria, frequent check‑ins, and code reviews.
We value pragmatic engineering, performance, and maintainability.

Send your information to: Prof. Pirouz Kavehpour—Pirouz@seas.ucla.edu

The University of Alabama is in search of Professors

If you are completing your PhD this year (or who have recently graduated) that are interested in opportunities to continue your research careers on the tenure track, the University of Alabama is in search of an assistant professor.

Electrical and Computer Engineering – Assistant Professor – 527587 – Tuscaloosa, Alabama, United States

The search is currently active and they’ll begin reviewing applications received through the online submission system in the next few weeks.

They are also recruiting at the Associate and Full Professor levels. Those links with further details are below:

Electrical and Computer Engineering – Associate Professor – 527631 – Tuscaloosa, Alabama, United States

Electrical and Computer Engineering – Professor – 527632 – Tuscaloosa, Alabama, United States

Electrical/Computer Engineering Intern at Sophia Space

A well-funded deep-tech startup in Pasadena is seeking Electrical/Computer Engineering Interns to help develop its AI-powered product prototypes. The interns are expected to blend electronics hardware and embedded software to build groundbreaking AI infrastructure in space. Roles are available full-time or part-time starting immediately, with the option to continue part-time (~10–15 hrs/week) during the academic year.

Please see this link for more information regarding this position.

Cellular SOC Design Verification Engineer – Entry Level at Apple

Do you have a passion for invention and self-challenge? This position gives you an opportunity to be a part of one of the most cutting edge and key projects that Apple’s Silicon Engineering Group has embarked upon to-date. As a Design Verification Engineer on our team, you’ll be at the center of the verification effort within our silicon design group responsible for crafting and productizing state-of-the-art Cellular SoCs!

You will have the opportunity to contribute to the verification effort of a set of complex SOCs delivering the Cellular solution. You will integrate multiple sophisticated IP level DV environments, craft highly reusable best-in-class UVM based test bench, implement effective coverage driven and directed test suites, deploy new tools and methodologies to deliver chips that are right-first-time. By collaborating with other product development groups across Apple, you can push the industry boundaries of what cellular systems can do and improve the product experience for our customers across the world!

Minimum Qualifications:
BS in EE or CS is required
Object Oriented Programming
Coursework in Digital Design

Preferred Qualifications:
MS in EE or CS
Coursework in Computer Architecture, Networking Protocol
Should be a great teammate with excellent communication and problem-solving skills and the
desire to seek diverse challenges.
Programming experience in SystemVerilog, Python, C++

Application details:

Candidates must be graduating this December
Please include your current GPA with your resume
Please send resume directly to Junhui Lou at j_lou@apple.com

Engineer or Project Manager at DMF Lighting

DMF Lighting designs and builds industry-leading LED downlighting that sets the standard for flexibility, performance, and quality. Founded over 30 years ago, DMF has grown into a leader in the lighting industry, driven by a passion for innovation and customer service.

Our in-house engineers constantly push the boundaries of lighting, delivering products that combine exceptional performance with beautiful design. At DMF, we believe in a collaborative, forward-thinking culture that empowers our team to bring creative ideas to life and make a lasting impact. If you’re looking for a company where creativity and innovation are part of the DNA, DMF is the place for you.

We currently have the following openings available:

Electrical Engineer, Sr. Electrical Engineer, Embedded Firmware Engineer, Mechanical Engineer I, Mechanical Engineer, Project Manager

Website: www.dmflighting.com

Please see this link for more information regarding these positions.

Contact: Helen Portillo, Human Resources Generalist at HPortillo@dmflighting.com

Newsletter Submissions

To be included in future newsletters, please send the latest news, awards, publications and any upcoming PhD oral defenses to the Chair’s assistant, Winda Mak, at wmak@seas.ucla.edu. Please include “newsletter submission” in the subject line. The ECE newsletters will be sent bimonthly on the first and third Mondays of the month. Please ensure all submissions are received by the Wednesday before distribution to be included in the newsletter.