On April 25, The Wireless Networking and Communications Group director Todd Humphreys presented the 2025 Student Leadership Awards. This annual honor is granted to graduate students who exemplify the integrity, initiative, and stewardship that encapsulate WNCG’s mission of academic excellence.
This year’s winners were Litu Rout and Taekyun Lee.
Rout has worked with Constantine Caramanis and Sanjay Shakkottai as a Ph.D. student in the Chandra Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin since August of 2022. He earned his BTech from the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST), where his bachelor's thesis received the Innovative Student Project Award offered by the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE). His research at UT Austin focuses on the theoretical foundations of generative models (e.g. diffusion, flows, and optimal transport) and their applications in conditional sampling (e.g. inverse problems, image/video editing, and personalization). He has interned at Qualcomm in the past, and is currently working as a student researcher with Google Research.
Shakkottai said “Litu has been a great resource for students interested in training large ML models. He has helped them configure and get their models running on the TACC GPU cluster. He has also generously (and discretely) helped faculty who are trying to catch up on their coding skills.
He has run the diffusions seminar last year. This seminar is hosted by him biweekly, and had leading industry researchers present their work. It was very well attended by students at UT and beyond. It was jointly organized with Caltech, Harvard, and UC Berkeley. Litu was very much the leader in this and single handedly ran this series.”
Taekyun Lee joined WNCG as an MS & Ph.D. student advised by Jeff Andrews and Hyeji Kim in 2022 after obtaining his B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Seoul National University. At UT Austin, his research is focused on wireless communication, generative models, reinforcement learning, and large language models. He interned at Keysight Technologies in 2023 and will intern at NVIDIA headquarters this summer.
Andrews said of his work at WNCG “Taekyun has been a quiet leader not only in each our research groups (e.g. organizing group meetings and helping to pool resources), but also in WNCG more broadly. He has helped other students learn key ML for wireless tools from Sionna, AerialSim, Quadriga, and other data sets (like DeepMIMO), and shared his code base on diffusion models and other code. This is spoken to by his large number of collaborative papers including with a student at MIT. He is also a reliable contributor to WNCG events as a poster presenter at all our recent events.”
Congratulations to the 2025 Student Leadership Award winners!