Oxford Engineering Student Awarded Prestigious Google PhD Fellowship

For 16 years, the Google PhD Fellowship Program has supported outstanding graduate students pioneering research in computer science and related disciplines. The programme aims to nurture the next generation of researchers addressing some of the world’s most pressing scientific and technological challenges.

Fellows receive direct financial support for their doctoral studies, one-to-one mentorship from a Google Research Mentor, and opportunities to connect with a global research community - fostering collaboration and innovation across the scientific landscape. Since its inception, the Google programme has supported over 950 students from 44 countries and 227 institutions, with this year’s cohort marking an expansion into new regions including Latin America and the Middle East.

Sindhu Balachandra Hegde is a fourth-year DPhil student in the Visual Geometry Group (VGG) at the University of Oxford, supervised by Professor Andrew Zisserman. Her research focuses on video understanding and multimodal learning, with an emphasis on visual communication -- including human gesture understanding and lip reading. She is particularly interested in developing models that can interpret how humans convey meaning through both verbal and non-verbal signals, enabling machines to better understand the nuances of human interaction.

Before joining Oxford, she completed her Master’s degree at IIIT Hyderabad, India. Sindhu says, “I feel very honoured to receive the Google PhD Fellowship in Machine Perception. Publishing in our research area is quite challenging, and it is wonderful to have my contributions recognized. I am deeply thankful for the support of my advisor and collaborators. I plan to use the fellowship to advance my work on human visual communication, exploring richer models of how people express meaning through various visual signals. I am also keen to use this opportunity to attend international conferences, engage with fellow researchers, and gather insightful feedback that will help shape the next stages of my work”.

See the complete list of 2025 Google PhD Fellowship recipients.