Computer Science Ph.D. student Mahdi Abbaspour Tehrani has received the Advanced Simulation and Training Fellowship from The Link Foundation. He is the first at UC Irvine to receive the $26,000 annual fellowship, only awarded to a handful of students throughout the country. Tehrani’s fellow recipients hail from Stanford, University of Central Florida and the Rochester Institute of Technology.

According to The Link Foundation website, the organization “supports programs to foster the theoretical basis, practical knowledge, and application of energy, simulation, and ocean engineering and instrumentation research, and to disseminate the results of that research through lectures, seminars and publications.” It was established in 1953 by Edwin A. Link—who built the first successful flight simulator in 1929—and his wife, Marion. Over the years, The Link Foundation has awarded more than $14 million to fund scholarly pursuits consistent with their mission.

“I am very happy to receive this fellowship,” Tehrani says. “It helps me in my Ph.D. progress tremendously. With this fellowship, I won’t need to work as a teaching assistant, and as a result I can focus more on my project. It also provides funding to buy all the equipment that I need in my research.”

Tehrani’s main research interests lie in computer graphics, computer vision and human-computer interaction. He works with computer science professors Aditi Majumder and Gopi Meenakshisundaram—both former Link Foundation Fellows themselves—in UCI’s Interactive Graphics and Visualization Lab (iGravi).