ECE’s Christopher Kniss and Elise Polizzi Receive NSF Graduate Research Fellowships
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Christopher Kniss, a Ph.D. student in the UMass Amherst Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department, and ECE undergraduate senior Elise Polizzi have each obtained prestigious Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The much-sought-after NSF fellowships provide each student with a three-year annual stipend of $37,000, along with a $12,000 allowance for tuition and fees as paid to the institution. Undergraduate Riley Cole of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department also earned an honorable mention in the NSF program.
The program recognizes and supports outstanding students who are pursuing research-based graduate degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Kniss has been at UMass since 2025 after earning his B.E. in Computer Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. Kniss does his research in the laboratory of ECE Associate Professor Yanghyo (Rod) Kim, whose lab studies integrated circuits and systems for millimeter-wave communication and science/technology.
Among other research experiences, Kniss spent the summer of 2025 at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, as a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Student Intern in the Physical Measurement Laboratory. The NIST SURF program is designed to give students hands-on research experience in a professional or academic-lab setting with mentorship from experienced scientists or faculty.
Kniss has some valuable experience related to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He was the lead author of a paper published in the November 2025 issue of the prestigious IEEE Journal of Microwaves titled “Temperature-Compensated Multi-Level CMOS Modulators Operating From 10 K to 300 K for Cryogenic Interconnects.” He also contributed to conference papers on “A 28nm CMOS Almost All-Digital 0.5 to 4.0 GHz Ultra-Wideband Ground Penetrating Radar for Lunar Surface Exploration” at the 2025 IEEE/MTT-S International Microwave Symposium and on “Ceramic Fiber Interconnects Beyond 1000°C Enabled by Automatic Gain Compensated Millimeter-Wave CMOS Transceivers” at the 2025 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems.
Polizzi is a Commonwealth Honors College senior with a double degree in Electrical
Engineering and Physics with a minor in Math. As she explained about her Senior Thesis, “I am conducting a full-year interdisciplinary Honors Thesis under [MIE] Professor Ashwin Ramasubramanian focusing on the electronic structure of two-dimensional oxide semiconductor interfaces for …The goal is to deepen our understanding of how quantum effects influence these systems and to explore new, interesting oxides with potential applications in next-generation electronic devices. Using first-principle calculations, the goal is to deepen our understanding on how these interfaces behave.”
At UMass Amherst, Polizzi’s first research experience was in Physics Professor Scott Hertel’s dark matter detection lab. Her project focused on designing a custom superconducting PCB aimed at reducing noise levels to enhance detection accuracy.
Polizzi’s wealth of extramural experiences include an NSF REU (Research Experiences for
Undergraduates) Fellowship in Material Science and Engineering performed at Dartmouth
College, where she focused on experimentally characterizing and identifying the thickness and
electronic behavior of various sol gel printed indium oxide-based semiconductor mixtures. She
also did an NSF REU Fellowship at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she
worked towards developing a custom, Bluetooth-enabled, flexible PCB to interface with self-
powered wearable technology. She will use her NSF fellowship while attending the University of California Berkeley Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences in the field of Physical Electronics.
Cole is a senior student-athlete double-majoring in Civil Engineering and Earth Systems as a member of the Commonwealth Honors College and a competitor on the UMass Cross-Country and Track & Field teams. He has been an Environmental Geochemistry Research Assistant in the College of Natural Sciences since May of 2024. He also served as an Energy-Efficient Wastewater Treatment Research Assistant in the Riccio College of Engineering for 11 months in 2023 and as a Geotech Engineer and Environmental Consultant Intern at O'Reilly, Talbot & Okun Associates during the summer of 2025. (May 2026)