Shilong Zhang, a Ph.D. candidate from Professor Youngsoo Shin’s research group (DT Lab) in the School of Electrical Engineering, has been selected as the recipient of the 2026 SPIE Nick Cobb Memorial Scholarship, receiving a $10,000 award.
The SPIE Nick Cobb Memorial Scholarship is awarded to an outstanding graduate student studying advanced lithography or a related field, jointly funded by Siemens EDA and SPIE. Nick Cobb was a Senior Member of SPIE and Chief Engineer at Mentor Graphics (now Siemens EDA), whose pioneering contributions enabled optical and process proximity correction (OPC) for IC manufacturing.
Zhang has been recognized for his outstanding research accomplishments, including winning the First Place Photronics Best Student Presentation Award at SPIE Photomask Technology + EUV Lithography 2025 and the ISE President Best Paper Award at the 2024 International SoC Design Conference. He was honored during the 2026 SPIE Advanced Lithography + Patterning conference, held February 22–26 in San Jose, California, where he also presented his paper titled “Etch proximity correction for curvilinear layout: Curve sampling with ML etch bias model.”
For details, refer to the link below:
https://spie.org/news/2026-spie-nick-cobb-memorial-scholarship-recipient-announced
