Princeton students honored at Opening Exercises gather with President Christopher L. Eisgruber (back row, left) and Dean of the College Michael D. Gordin (far right). The students are (front row, from left) Braeden Carroll, Caroline Zhao and Ram Narayanan, and (back row, from left), Connie Gong, Akshat Agarwal, and Ian Henriques. Photo by Matthew Raspanti, Office of Communications
Ian Henriques, undergraduate in electrical and computer engineering *25, received the Class of 1939 Princeton Scholar Award for having achieved the highest academic standing for all preceding college work at the University at the end of junior year.
Henriques said one of his favorite courses so far has been the Car Lab, a required course for every ECE major where they build their own autonomous vehicles. “It gave us an opportunity to work on a project end to end, and there’s a lot of creativity involved,” he said. “My teammate and I built a robot that walks around and if it encounters a laser, it starts meowing and chasing it like a cat.”
Outside of the classroom, Henriques is co-president of the Princeton University Robotics Club. In 2023, he co-led the winning team at Harvard University’s PacBot Competition, in which students build robots to navigate a Pac-Man-inspired course. Princeton’s Robotics Club earned the highest score in the competition’s history and shared first place with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Henriques is also the co-leader of Princeton’s Loaves and Fishes program with the Diocese of Trenton, which provides meals to homeless and low-income individuals. He has served as a teaching assistant for several engineering, physics and mathematics courses.
This summer, he interned at the AI chip technology firm Nvidia. “I’m still deciding on exactly what I want to do after graduation, but I know it’ll be related to software,” he said. “I’m really interested in self-driving cars, mobile robots, things like that.”
Henriques is a two-time recipient of the Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence, and received the Manfred Pyka Memorial Physics Prize in 2022. For his senior thesis, he plans to work with Niraj Jha, professor of electrical and computer engineering, with a focus on computer architecture and machine learning.
Princeton University celebrated the academic accomplishments of its students with the awarding of undergraduate prizes to students at Opening Exercises on Sunday, Sept. 1.