Ashman Mehra Named 2025 Quad Fellow

Ashman Mehra, a master's student in Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Department, has been selected as a 2025 Quad Fellow, one of 37 students worldwide to earn the distinction.

Now in its third year, the fellowship supports exceptional graduate students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and aims to create a network of researchers, scientists, policymakers and innovators to address global challenges. The 2025 cohort includes fellows from 11 countries pursuing graduate studies in 29 STEM fields. Each fellow receives a $20,000 scholarship funded by industry partners and administered by the Institute of International Education.

Mehra, who is the only 2025 fellow specializing in computer science at the master's level, completed his bachelor's degree in engineering at India's Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. His research focuses on applied machine learning, with published work spanning reinforcement learning, distributed systems, computer vision and natural language processing. He has contributed to the development of distributed routing algorithms that have significantly reduced the carbon footprint of ride sharing and transportation, as well as multimodal machine learning models for music classification across languages. His research has been published and recognized by top journals and conferences organized by IEEE and Springer.

"I plan to use the fellowship to advance my research and study at Carnegie Mellon. Being a Quad fellow will help me leverage systems to make machine learning scalable, efficient and accessible to all," Mehra said.

Learn more about the award on the Quad Fellowship website.