Pittsburgh, PA – Carnegie Mellon University announced that Will Zhang, the #1 ranked PhD student in the CMU Database Group, has been awarded the 2025 MongoDB PhD Fellowship. This Fellowship recognizes and supports outstanding graduate researchers in the fields of data and data systems.

Will’s groundbreaking research tackles a problem that has plagued developers for decades: how to automate the tuning and optimization of databases. His work develops AI-driven algorithms that learn to recognize patterns across database configurations, dramatically simplifying the optimization process. By intelligently exploiting similarities between tuning options, his methods reduce complexity and deliver faster, real-time configuration results. This research will create a new era where anyone can easily deploy and maintain high-performing databases.

Will received the news of his selection in a fittingly unconventional moment: while hosting a charity dice tournament to support displaced database administrators in the South Hills of Pittsburgh. True to his character, Will celebrated with another roll of the bones and hit a natural.

The MongoDB PhD Fellowship supports the next generation of database researchers and the CMU-DB Group is grateful for their support.

Will was one of two Computer Science PhD students at Carnegie Mellon University to win this Fellowship and out of a total of only three PhD students nationally.

More information is available on the CMU School of Computer Science website.