From the ARC Lab to NVIDIA and Apple: Abiel Almonte’s Journey

This story was first reported by FIU News. Read the full original article here:“Undergraduate research set student on path to NVIDIA and Apple” →

Almonte at the Spring 2026 College of Engineering & Computing Senior Design Showcase.

At the Applied Research Center, we like to say that research is where careers actually begin — and computer engineering senior Abiel Almonte is proof of it. Before he’d attended a single lecture at FIU, Almonte was already in our lab, having spent the summer before his freshman year seeking out a research home instead of waiting for the semester to start.

That early initiative is exactly the kind of drive ARC looks to support. Over the year and a half that followed, Almonte moved from an eager newcomer into a contributing researcher — work that ultimately opened doors to internships at NVIDIA and Apple, two of the most competitive employers in tech.

Mentorship at the Center of the Story

What doesn’t always make it into the headlines is the role mentorship plays in getting a student from “interested” to “industry-ready.” For Almonte, that mentor was Dr. Himanshu Upadhyay, professor of electrical and computer engineering, who guided his development across the AI engineering stack — from early coding fundamentals to co-authoring a peer-reviewed paper, “Adversarial AI Training to Mitigate Cyber Attacks,” presented at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Testing.

Dr. Upadhyay has been direct about what set Almonte apart: a willingness to sit with hard, unresolved technical problems rather than avoid them.

“He has a proven ability to tackle deep-tech bottlenecks… his work bridges the gap between raw hardware acceleration and advanced application deployment,” says Dr. Upadhyay.

It’s the kind of mentorship ARC tries to build into every research placement: faculty who don’t just supervise a project, but actively shape a student’s trajectory. In Almonte’s case, that meant pushing him beyond routine lab tasks and into the kind of original, publishable work that recruiters at companies like NVIDIA and Apple notice.

This post draws on original reporting by Adrienne Sylver for FIU News, published September 17, 2026. Read the full story: news.fiu.edu/2026/fiu-research-sets-student-on-path-to-nvidia-and-apple