Second-year computer science student Edward Sun from the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering has earned the Goldwater Scholarship, a nationally competitive award that honors undergraduate students who show exceptional promise as researchers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Along with three other UCLA students, Sun joined a cohort of 441 scholarship recipients selected by the federally endowed Goldwater Foundation from more than 5,000 applicants in their second or third year of college.
Sun has researched multi-modal large language models (LLMs) for proteins and RNA at the Scalable Analytics Institute and is currently exploring robot policy learning at the UCLA Robot Intelligence Lab. Mentored by Wei Wang — the Leonard Kleinrock Endowed Chair in Computer Science and chair of the department — and computer science assistant professor Yuchen Cui, his work focuses on enhancing the efficiency and scope of LLM applications in scientific research and improving how robots perceive and interact with the world. Through these efforts, Sun aims to enable scientists to tackle deeper, more complex questions with greater confidence. Sun also leads the software team for Bruin Underwater Robotics, a project affiliated with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers at UCLA. After completing his undergraduate studies, Sun plans to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science with a focus on deep learning applications.
Goldwater Scholarships are awarded by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, which was established by Congress in 1986 as a tribute to the late U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater, who represented Arizona for 30 years.