FIU student earns IBM Ph.D. fellowship


Jorge Guerra, a Ph.D. candidate in FIU’s School of Computing and Information Sciences, has been awarded the prestigious 2010 IBM Ph.D. Fellowship, one of only 40 worldwide awards given this year. In the field of computer science, this award is considered the most respected among all Fellowship awards.

Jorge Guerra

The IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Awards Program is an intensely competitive worldwide program honoring exceptional Ph.D. students who have an interest in solving problems that are important to IBM and fundamental to innovation in many academic disciplines and areas of study. Fellowships are awarded for one academic year and are renewable yearly for a total of up to three years. Guerra will receive $30,000, which includes a stipend and an educational allowance.

Guerra’s doctoral dissertation tackles the problem of creating an end-to-end infrastructure for self-managing storage systems that dynamically adapt storage management to changes in the workload. His contributions include both foundational theory and a software infrastructure, which will be useful in building self-managing storage systems in the future. His research has also focused on improving the energy-efficiency of storage systems with researchers at IBM Almaden and building high-performance storage system solutions with his colleagues at FIU.

Currently, Guerra is working on a novel abstraction for using storage systems that combine the simplicity of a memory interface with the persistence properties of storage. This work is being adapted by researchers at Sandia National Laboratories for use within their supercomputing systems.

Guerra’s research has been published in the most respected venues in his field such as the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, the IEEE Conference on High-Performance Computer Architecture, and the Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems.

“We are extremely proud of Jorge’s accomplishment, which brings a lot of prestige to our school and to the university,” said Jainendra Navlakha, director of the School of Computing and Information Sciences. “This honor places us squarely among academic departments noted for outstanding doctoral education in computer science. It is bound to open doors of opportunity for other students.”

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