At MongoDB, we’re committed to fostering collaboration between academia and industry to support emerging research leaders. Now in its second year, the aim of the MongoDB PhD Fellowship Program is to advance cutting-edge research in computer science. Fellows receive financial support, mentorship, and opportunities to engage with MongoDB’s researchers and engineers throughout the year-long fellowship. They are also invited to present their research at MongoDB events.
It’s hardly groundbreaking—but nonetheless true—to say that the world runs on software. As a result, investing in the future of software development is of paramount importance. So MongoDB is excited and honored to help these students push the frontiers of knowledge in their fields, and to contribute to innovations that will redefine the future of technology.
Celebrating the 2025 MongoDB PhD Fellows
This year, the selection process was extremely competitive, and the quality of the applications was excellent. The review panel of MongoDB researchers and engineers was impressed with the applicants’ accomplishments to date, as well as with their ambitious goals for future research.
Without further ado, I’m delighted to announce the recipients of the 2025 MongoDB PhD Fellowship. Congratulations to Xingjian Bai, William Zhang, and Renfei Zhou! These three exceptional scholars stood out for their innovative research and potential to drive significant advancements in their field.
Xingjian Bai, PhD candidate at MIT
Xingjian Bai is a first-year PhD student in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, supervised by Associate Professor Kaiming He. He obtained his master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Oxford. His research lies at the intersection of classic algorithms and deep learning, with a focus on physics-inspired generative models and learning-augmented algorithms. More broadly, he is driven by research directions that are scientifically impactful or intellectually stimulating. In his spare time, he enjoys playing tennis and jogging.
“I sincerely appreciate MongoDB’s support for Xingjian and contributions to fundamental research on artificial intelligence, deep learning, and machine learning.”
– Kaiming He, Associate Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT
William Zhang, PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University
William Zhang is a third-year PhD student in the Computer Science Department, School of Computer Science, at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interest focuses on “self-driving” database management systems (DBMSs), specifically focusing on machine-learning-based techniques for optimizing their performance. He is advised by Associate Professor Andy Pavlo and is a member of the Database Group (CMU-DB) and Parallel Data Lab.
“Will Zhang’s PhD research at Carnegie Mellon University seeks to solve the problem all developers have struggled with since the 1970s: how to automate tuning and optimizing a database. Will is using an AI-based approach to develop database optimization algorithms that automatically learn how to exploit similarities between tuning options to reduce the complexity of database optimization. If successful his research will make it easier for anyone to deploy a database and maintain it as it grows over its lifetime. Removing the human burden of maintaining a database is especially important in the modern era of data-intensive AI applications.
The Carnegie Mellon Database Group is grateful for MongoDB’s support for Will’s research through their PhD Fellowship program. Working with his mentor at MongoDB as part of the program provides Will with invaluable guidance and insight into the challenges developers face with databases, especially in a cloud setting like MongoDB Atlas.”
– Andy Pavlo, Associate Professor of Computer Science at CMU
Renfei Zhou, PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University
Renfei Zhou is a first-year PhD student studying theoretical computer science at CMU, co-advised by Assistant Professor William Kuszmaul and U.A. and Helen Whitaker Professor Guy Blelloch. He completed his bachelor’s degree in the Yao Class at Tsinghua University. He mainly works on classical data structures, especially hash tables and succinct data structures. He is also known for his work on fast matrix multiplication.
“Renfei’s research focuses on answering basic questions about how space- and time-efficient data structures can be. This is a research area that has a lot of potential for impact—both on how we, as theoreticians, think about data structures, but also on how data structures are implemented in the real world. Renfei isn’t just a great researcher, he’s also a great collaborator, and his research will almost certainly benefit from the mentorship that he will receive from researchers and engineers at MongoDB.”
– William Kuszmaul, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at CMU
Seny Kamara, Head of Research at MongoDB, shared his thoughts on the program’s second year: “The applications we received for the fellowship were outstanding, but Renfei’s, Will’s and Xingjian’s research stood out for their depth and ambition. Their work tackles important problems in computer science and has the potential to impact both the wider industry as well as MongoDB’s efforts. We are very excited to collaborate with these exceptional students and to support their research.”
We proudly congratulate this year’s winners and thank everyone who took the time to apply!
The nomination window for the 2026 MongoDB PhD Fellowship Program will open on September 2, and we invite all PhD students with innovative ideas to apply. For more information about the MongoDB PhD Fellowship Program, the application process, and deadlines for next year’s fellowships, please visit our PhD Fellowship Program page.
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