Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and College of Computing Assistant Professor Divya Mahajan received an inaugural Google ML and Systems Junior Faculty Award.

She was recognized for the significance and promise of her work in machine learning data pipeline infrastructure.

“I’m honored to receive this award,” Mahajan said. “It’s very meaningful to me as it reinforces the importance of cross-disciplinary research in enabling the next generation of AI systems. I’m grateful to Google for recognizing and supporting early-career researchers; programs like this play a crucial role in advancing the next generation systems and ML.”

Just 50 assistant professors from 27 U.S. universities were selected for the award by a panel of Google engineers and researchers.

The award was established to support academic research in the areas of analysis, design and implementation of efficient, scalable, secure, and trustworthy computing systems.

Mahajan’s research lies at the intersection of architecture, machine learning, and systems, with a focus on building efficient infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI). 

Her Systems Infrastructure and Architecture Research Lab looks to optimize large language model training through full-stack techniques that account for power, thermal, and communication bottlenecks. The lab also designs data pipelines and runtime systems that support scalable, low-latency inference and training.

She joined the Georgia Tech faculty in 2023 after a stint at Microsoft as a senior researcher. Prior to that, she received her Ph.D. in computer science from Georgia Tech in 2019.