In November 2022, graduate student Brandon Ung was awarded the IEEE Life Members Graduate Study Fellowship in Electrical Engineering by the IEEE Educational Activities Board. Established in 2000, the fellowship recognizes the exceptional achievements of a student in their first year of a graduate program in any area of electrical engineering.
Ung is pursuing his studies at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Ung’s interests lie in VLSI, computer architecture, and machine learning, areas that are critical to advances in the 5G, data center, and automotive industries. He has been focusing his energy on hyperdimensional computing, an emerging brain-inspired paradigm used for machine learning classification tasks, which allows for fast learning, energy efficiency, noise tolerance, and a highly parallel distributed framework.
Like most students in the electrical engineering majors, Ung joined UMN IEEE, the student branch chapter of IEEE at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. This was followed by an invitation to join the Omicron chapter of IEEE-HKN, IEEE’s honor society. Ung has been an active member and leader of both groups. As a chair of UMN IEEE, Ung, with the support of the group’s officers, has been pivotal in organizing activities and events.
Ung is the son of Cambodian refugees and a first-generation university student.“Being a fellowship recipient has made my parents proud. Their education was taken away from them when they became refugees, but they now have a child who has received a graduate fellowship, Ung said.” Ung views the IEEE fellowship as the outcome of his strong academic performance and his deep and sustained engagement with the UMN IEEE student branch and IEEE-HKN.
Learn more about the IEEE Life Members Graduate Study Fellowship in Electrical Engineering
