Our Columbia graduation ceremonies took a substantial part of this week and were amazing.
I love graduating from Columbia. Growing up in the direst poverty and deprivation in the 1990s Russia, I could not dare to dream of getting to this amazing day. It feels truly extraordinarily; my heart is filled with deep gratitude to everybody who helped me get to this amazing day.
With my adviser Gil Zussman and close collaborator John Sarik.
With mom and dad.
Now, with the ceremonies behind me, I am in full swing of exploring the paths to my next adventure. The adventure needs to be big, no, HUGE — something that seems as insurmountable to me now as a Columbia University Ph.D. seemed mere years before this week.
About Maria Gorlatova
Dr. Maria Gorlatova is the Sternberg Family Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. Her research centers on pervasive computing technologies, with a focus on spatial computing and next-generation augmented reality. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and her M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees (Summa Cum Laude) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ottawa, Canada. She spent two years at Princeton University’s Electrical Engineering Department as an Associate Research Scholar and Associate Director of the Princeton University EDGE Lab. Dr. Gorlatova was named one of the N2Women Rising Stars and has received multiple awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, the DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), the DARPA Director’s Fellowship, the IEEE ISMAR 2025 Best Paper Award, the IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communications, and research awards from Meta, Cisco, and IBM. She served as the TPC Co-chair of ACM/IEEE IPSN 2023, the General Co-Chair of the 2025 NSF Workshop on Networking and Systems Challenges in Immersive Computing, and the TPC Co-chair of ACM/IEEE SenSys 2025.
