Three ECE Students Honored with UMD Graduate Assistant Awards

Sahan Liyanaarachchi, Supratik Sarkar and Chidiebere Udenze have each received a University of Maryland 2025-2026 Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award. This award recognizes the outstanding contributions that graduate assistants provide to students, faculty, departments, administrative units, and the university as a whole. The Graduate School awards approximately 80 Outstanding Graduate Assistant Awards annually, which represents roughly the top 2% of campus GA's in a given year.

Sahan Liyanaarachchi

After earning a B.Sc degree in electronic and telecommunication engineering from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka in 2020, Sahan Chamara Liyanaarachchi earned his MS in electrical engineering from UMD in 2025. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. at UMD under the advisement of Professor Sennur Ulukus. His research interests include age of information, remote estimation, information theory, and federated learning. He is particularly focused on the design of control policies for communications systems with channel delays, packet errors and out-of-transmission with the aim of bridging the gap between theoretical abstraction and real-world utilityin such systems.

“Sahan’s academic and research performance has been outstanding, with a perfect 4.0 GPA on the academic side together with a sequence of strong results on the research side,” says Professor Ulukus. “His cutting-edge research on age of information and timely remote estimation has the potential of significant theoretical and practical impact in future wireless communication and control networks. This recognition of his academic and research excellence is well-deserved.”

Supratik Sarkar

Supratik Sarkar is a member of the Hafezi Group, part of the UMD Joint Quantum Institute (JQI). He is a 5th year Ph.D. student advised by Professor Mohammad Hafezi. His research focuses on the intersection of light-matter interaction, many-body physics and topological effects in photonic integrated devise and low-dimensional materials.

“Supratik is truly deserving of this recognition — his extraordinary technical breadth, scientific creativity, and generous collaborative spirit have left a lasting mark on our research group and the broader field,” says Professor Hafezi. “It is deeply gratifying to see his contributions celebrated with the ECE Distinguished Dissertation Award.”

He was awarded the prestigious NSF I-Corps grant, which provided $50,000 to be applied to developing one project into commercialized market-ready technology. In the past few years, he has contributed to and co-authored multiple publications, given presentations at international conferences, and applied for 3 provisional U.S. patents through UMD. He was recently part of the team that was awarded the UMD Invention of the Year in the Quantum Technology category for their project titled “Topological Photonics Architectures for Optical Computing and Artificial Intelligence (TOPAI).”

Chidiebere Udenze

Chidiebere Theodore Udenze is a third-year Ph.D. student studying photonic integrated circuits (PICs). He is a member of the Photonic Materials and Devices Laboratory and is supervised by Professor Carlos A. Rios Ocampo. His research involves the design and analysis of PICs for high-speed photonic analog-to-digital converters to be used for energy-efficient and high-bandwidth ADC architectures for gigahertz-range signal processing applications. In addition, he is investigating modulation-based PICs for operation in high-field magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) environments.

“Chidiebere is a student who has successfully navigated the challenges of today’s research funding landscape by supporting his PhD through teaching assistantships,” says Professor Rios Ocampo. “His ability to excel in both research and teaching—while earning recognition through awards such as this—speaks strongly to his resilience and dedication.”

Published June 2, 2026