Computer Science Student Earns MongoDB PhD Fellowship

As data-intensive systems power everything from web services to AI, collaborations between universities and industry are becoming essential to pushing the boundaries of computer science. Computer Science PhD candidate Daniel DeLayo has been selected for a highly competitive MongoDB PhD Fellowship, a program that supports exceptional doctoral students whose research has the potential to shape the future of software and data systems.

MongoDB created its PhD Fellowship to support outstanding PhD candidates across computer science and related fields, providing financial support to their universities, mentorship from MongoDB researchers and engineers, and opportunities to present their work at company events. Fellows join a small global cohort of emerging research leaders and gain insight into how their ideas can influence real-world database and data-intensive systems.

DeLayo is a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science whose work sits at the intersection of algorithms, systems building, big data, and memory hierarchies and data locality. His recent publications explore how to move and cache data efficiently in modern memory systems and how to design algorithms that keep massive, constantly changing data sets responsive and scalable on modern hardware.

"Most computer scientists are skilled in either the engineering or the theoretical/mathematical foundations of CS - whereas Daniel is truly ambidextrous," said John L. Hennessy Endowed Professor of Computer Science Michael Bender. "Daniel is also a terrific communicator and colleague - any group runs better when he's part of it. I'm extremely grateful that MongoDB is supporting Daniel as part of their PhD Fellowship Program. I know that Daniel will love the opportunity to interact with engineers at MongoDB and vice versa."

For DeLayo, the fellowship is an opportunity to bring his research closer to practice. "I'm excited to work with MongoDB engineers to bring my caching, paging and parallelism research closer to industry," he said.

The recognition underscores both DeLayo's promise as a researcher and Stony Brook's growing strength in data-intensive systems, algorithms and large-scale computing. By connecting PhD students directly with engineers who build widely used database platforms, the MongoDB PhD Fellowship helps ensure that foundational ideas developed at Stony Brook can influence the next generation of real-world data infrastructure - benefiting students, industry partners and the broader technology ecosystem.

- Yuganshu Jain