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Melinda Agyekum, advised by Prof. Steven Nowick, has been selected for the Intel PhD Fellowship for her work in asynchronous digital systems. Asynchronous digital circuits perform synchronization and communication without using a global clock, and thereby can provide greater flexibility and timing-robustness in handling on-chip and off-chip communication. The goal of her work is to provide low-power encoding techniques that will allow asynchronous communication to become more tolerant of dynamic variability (e.g., soft-errors, cross-talk, noise, etc.) which has become an increasing problem due to device scaling. Ryan Overbeck's, advised by Prof. Ravi Ramamoorthi, focuses on real-time ray tracing. Ray tracing is the core of many physically-based algorithms for rendering 3D scenes with global illumination (shadows, reflections, refractions, indirect illumination, and other effects), but has not been fast enough for interactive rendering on commodity computers until recently. He develops algorithms to ray trace 3D scenes with high quality shadows, reflections, and refractions providing a higher degree of realism to interactive content.