The National Science Foundation (NSF) named Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Assistant Professor Divya Mahajan a recipient of the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award.

The CAREER Award is NSF’s most prestigious honor for early-career faculty, recognizing researchers who demonstrate the potential to become leaders in both research and education.

Mahajan received the award for her research on designing energy-efficient, adaptive artificial intelligence (AI) datacenters through a cyber-physical approach that jointly considers AI software, computing hardware, and the physical state of the underlying infrastructure.

As AI models continue to grow in scale and complexity, they place increasing demands on every layer of datacenter infrastructure—from accelerators, memory, and networking to power delivery, cooling, and security. Yet these systems are often designed and optimized one layer at a time, limiting overall efficiency and adaptability.

Mahajan’s research reimagines AI datacenters as cyber-physical systems in which software, hardware, and physical operating conditions continuously inform one another.

“AI infrastructure should be designed around the real-time condition of the hardware, not just its specifications,” Mahajan said. “By making AI systems aware of the physical state of the infrastructure, we can build datacenters that are more efficient, adaptive, and resilient at scale.”

The CAREER project integrates three complementary research thrusts. The first explores new approaches for jointly managing computation, memory, and networking resources to improve the efficiency of diverse AI workloads.

The second develops techniques that enable AI systems to monitor and adapt to changing hardware conditions, such as thermal hotspots, hardware variability, and power constraints, to maintain performance and energy efficiency.

The third investigates mechanisms for protecting valuable AI models from theft and unauthorized replication while they are deployed in cloud datacenters.

The project builds on Mahajan’s broader research agenda in AI systems and computer architecture, which seeks to co-design AI software, hardware, and datacenter operation for scalable and sustainable computing. Her prior work has developed techniques for predicting the performance of emerging AI hardware, optimizing distributed AI training across large GPU clusters, enabling low-latency distributed AI inference, jointly optimizing AI models and hardware architectures, and understanding how power, thermal behavior, and hardware variability influence AI datacenter efficiency.

Together, these contributions establish the foundation for the cyber-physical vision advanced through the CAREER project.

Mahajan is the first ECE faculty member to receive an NSF CAREER Award since Assistant Professor Callie Hao, who was recognized in 2024 for developing ArchHLS, a next-generation High-Level Synthesis tool.

Mahajan is currently the Sutterfield Family Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in the School of Computer Science. She leads the Systems for Scalable Intelligence (SCAI) Lab, where her research team focuses on devising next-generation efficient compute platforms for AI.

Mahajan returned to Georgia Tech in 2023 after receiving her Ph.D. from the Institute in 2019. Prior to joining the Georgia Tech faculty, she was a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Azure.

Her research has been recognized with the Google ML and Systems Junior Faculty Award, IIT Ropar Emerging Alumni Award, IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture Top Picks, the Georgia Tech College of Computing Best Dissertation Award, and the IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture Distinguished Paper Award.

Mahajan’s work has appeared in leading venues in computer architecture, machine learning, and systems, and her students have received numerous national and industry research honors.

Her students have received numerous honors, including the NVIDIA Fellowship, the NSERC Canada Graduate Research Scholarship, the MLCommons Rising Star recognition, the Georgia Tech President’s Undergraduate Research Award, and several university fellowships and research awards.