PhD Student Rashna Kumar Wins 2025 Pulse Research Fellowship
The Internet Society Pulse Research Fellowship supports researchers conducting data-driven analysis or developing tools that contribute to an open, globally connected, secure, and trustworthy Internet
Northwestern Engineering PhD student Rashna Kumar has been named a 2025 Pulse Research Fellow by the Internet Society. The third cohort of 10 fellows were selected from among 235 total applicants.
The six-month fellowship supports researchers conducting data-driven analysis or developing tools that contribute to an open, globally connected, secure, and trustworthy Internet. Projects are aligned with an Internet Society Pulse focus area, including enabling technologies, Internet shutdowns, Internet resilience, market concentration, and keeping traffic local.
Kumar, a PhD candidate in computer science advised by Fabian E. Bustamante, leads several projects with the AquaLab research group investigating large-scale networks and distributed systems. She examines the implications of the decade-long trend toward global Internet consolidation and centralization, including emerging concerns about digital sovereignty, security, and international dependencies.
In the first comprehensive study of E-government hosting models, Kumar examined the evolving landscape of server infrastructures in the government sector, and the choices governments make between leveraging third-party solutions and maintaining control over users' access to their services and information via on-premises infrastructure.
She will work with the Internet Society Pulse mentors and research team to build on this work.
“I am deeply honored to receive the Pulse Research Fellowship, which provides an invaluable opportunity to expand my research on the network infrastructure used to access public-facing government websites,” Kumar said. “This fellowship will enable me to contribute meaningful insights into the on-path concentration and cross-border dependencies of public Internet services, helping to foster diversification, safeguard sovereignty, and strengthen the resilience of Internet infrastructure.”
Through the fellowship, Kumar aims to incorporate a broader set of client vantage points along network access routes, mapping connectivity paths to assess geographic and jurisdictional dependencies.
Kumar earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 2019 from the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan.
In 2022, Kumar was selected as an AnitaB.org Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Scholar and for the Computing Research Association Widening Participation Grad Cohort for Women. Kumar won first place in the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communications (ACM SIGCOMM) 2021 Student Research Competition.