“Nishant Kumar (B Tech CSE, IIT Delhi, 2016) was an extremely creative PhD student at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In a short span of time, Nishant managed to do wonderful things and touched the lives of many. As a software engineer and then a Research Fellow, he made important contributions to the Azure Backup team in Microsoft Hyderabad and published several outstanding cryptography research papers at both Microsoft Research India as well as UIUC. He had a real strong drive for research and a child-like enthusiasm to learn everything he could. Above everything else, Nishant was an extremely warm, affectionate person with an endearing smile, caring and considerate towards everyone around him. He was a devoted son, brother, and uncle. The “Nishant Kumar Memorial Award for the Best PhD Thesis in Computer Science and Engineering” is instituted to honour his legacy.”
We thank Nishant Chandran and other donors of Microsoft for instituting this award at CSE, IIT Delhi. The Department has decided to confer the Nishant Kumar Award for the academic year 2025–26 in the week following the convocation(i.e 2nd August, 2025). This award recognizes outstanding Ph.D. thesis in the department.
The awardees for this year are as follows:
| Name | Advisor Name | Thesis Title | Year |
| Abhishek Rose | Sorav Bansal | “Modeling Dynamic Allocations and Deallocations of Local Memory for Translation Validation” | 2025 |
| Arindam Bhattacharya | Amitabha Bagchi,Srikanta Bedathur | “Scalable Methods for Learning Practical Data-Aware Bloom Filters” | 2024 |
The department congratulates the awardees for their exceptional research work.