Saksham Agarwal, an assistant professor of electrical & computer engineering, has been awarded the 2025 SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award by the Association for Computing Machinery.
The award—considered one of the highest honors for a dissertation in the field of computer networking—recognizes excellent thesis research by doctoral candidates in computer networking and data communication. Candidates are nominated by members of their department and must be endorsed by their department chair as well as three additional faculty members.
Agarwal’s dissertation, titled “Host Congestion Control,” challenges the conventional wisdom that congestion in datacenter networks occurs primarily within the network fabric and investigates congestion that arises within the data path between the host’s peripheral devices and memory resources. Completed during his doctoral work at Cornell University, Agarwal’s dissertation also explores the implications of host congestion to the design of network protocols, network stacks, and operating systems, revisiting long-held assumptions and proposing practical solutions.
The celebrated work has opened up a new research direction, sparking new research questions at the intersection of networking, operating systems, and hardware.
“Winning this award is deeply meaningful—not just as a personal recognition, but because it reflects the value seen by the community in the research directions my dissertation has helped open up,” Agarwal said.
After graduating from Cornell with a PhD in computer science, Agarwal accepted a position in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering with the Illinois Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Drawn to Illinois by its legacy of groundbreaking work in networking, systems, and computer architecture, Agarwal is excited to work alongside some of the most influential faculty in the field.
His advice for current graduate students?
“Don’t shy away from exploring bold —even crazy—ideas,” Agarwal said. “Some of the most impactful research comes from challenging long-held conventional wisdom. Treat your dissertation as an opportunity to push intellectual boundaries and make a meaningful contribution to humanity’s understanding.”