---
title: "CARC welcomes new graduate research assistants Kevin Fotso Tagne and Aayush Gupta"
description: "This fall, the Center for Advanced Research Computing team will be joined by graduate research assistants Kevin Fotso Tagne and Aayush Gupta."
type: News
tags:
- News
date: "2021-09"
generated:
by: "process:scripts/port_legacy_pages.py"
at: "2026-09-10T00:00:00Z"
sources:
- id: carc-web
resource: "https://carc.unm.edu/news--events/News/carc-welcomes-new-research-assistants.html"
title: "CARC welcomes new graduate research assistants Kevin Fotso Tagne and Aayush Gupta (carc.unm.edu)"
author: "team:unm-carc"
---
# CARC welcomes new graduate research assistants Kevin Fotso Tagne and Aayush Gupta
September 2021
This fall, the Center for Advanced Research Computing team will be joined by
graduate research assistants Kevin Fotso Tagne and Aayush Gupta. Under the
guidance of Research Assistant Professor Matthew Fricke, the two will provide
technical support to university scientists while pursuing their own research
goals.
Kevin Fotso Tagne
Inspired by an early love of sci-fi movies, Fotso Tagne has always been
fascinated by technology and biology. In entering the field of biomedical
engineering, he found he was able to explore the intersection of these two
interests. After leaving his home country of Cameroon to earn a bachelor’s
degree at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Fotso Tagne relocated to New
Mexico for his graduate education.
While earning his master’s degree at UNM, Fotso Tagne coauthored [a
paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5409876/){target=_blank}
in *Magnetic Resonance in Medicine* on an imaging methodology aimed at
identifying age-related differences in the diffusion patterns of certain
metabolites within the brain. Now working towards his PhD, Fotso Tagne has
been engaged in research on multiple sclerosis (MS), a rare but sometimes
debilitating neurological disorder. His efforts focus on the development of
methods to predict the level of physical disability in patients with MS.
As he enters the final year of his PhD studies at UNM, Fotso Tagne chose to
join CARC to help other researchers and expand his knowledge of
high-performance computing. He comments, “I think it’s a fantastic environment
to grow and to contribute to the UNM community, so I love it.”
Aayush Gupta
For Gupta, computer science is a family tradition. He writes, “Since I was 5
years old, I remember assembling Desktops with my father and sister… In fact,
[my father] was the first one to introduce me to command prompt at a very
early age.”
Originally from New Delhi, India, Gupta came to UNM for graduate studies after
earning a bachelor’s degree in electronics and telecommunication from the
College of Engineering Roorkee. He went on to earn a master’s degree in
computer science at UNM, where he intends to complete his PhD in 2023.
Gupta’s graduate research has concentrated on the optimization of wireless
networks. His coauthored paper, [“Wake Up and Join Me! An Energy-Efficient
Algorithm for Maximal Matching in Radio
Networks,”](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.09096.pdf){target=_blank} has been
recently accepted by the 35th Int. Symposium on Distributed
Computing (DISC 2021), an international conference to be held in Freiburg,
Germany in October 2021.
Gupta applied to be a graduate research assistant at CARC after exploring the
center’s systems working with Assistant Professor Amanda Bienz and taking a
parallel processing course at UNM. His experience at CARC will help him gain
the skills necessary to further his career as a research scientist.
Fotso Tagne and Gupta will work with CARC’s high performance computing experts
throughout the fall 2021 semester and complete their assistantship with a
presentation on their latest research developments.