Computer science Ph.D. candidate Muhammad Twaha Ibrahim has been awarded the Link Foundation Fellowship for Modeling, Simulation and Training. “This fellowship is granted to only six or seven students nationwide each year,” says Tony Givargis, chair of the Department of Computer Science, “making it a remarkable achievement.”

The fellowship aims to foster advanced-level research in modeling, simulation and training by enabling Ph.D. students to work on their research full time and disseminate the results, supported by $34,000 in funding. “With the support from this fellowship, I can focus more time on developing and enhancing my current research, which is on Dynamic Spatially Augmented Reality, or DynaSAuR for short,” says Ibrahim. “Additionally, the funding from this fellowship can help me acquire [new] equipment for a number of cool research ideas I’ve been meaning to explore.”

DynaSAuR uses projectors to illuminate surfaces that might be moving or changing their shape. As Ibrahim explained during his award-winning Glad Slam pitch, one potential application of this work is the ability to annotate a surgical site — such a patient’s cheek — to improve remote collaboration during live surgeries. DynaSAuR can let surgeons all over the world collaborate with each other.

“Twaha has been an amazing graduate student,” says Aditi Majumder, Ibrahim’s Ph.D. advisor in UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS). “With a deep fire for excelling and a keen motivation to identify difficult problems, he puts in immense hard work to reach the best solutions. It’s no surprise that he has been winning numerous accolades for his work this year.”

Ibrahim looks forward to further advancing his research. “This is a very prestigious fellowship,” he says, “so I was really happy and excited to receive it.”

— Shani Murray