Celebrating Innovation: The NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Program
For an impressive 25 years, the NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Program has catalyzed remarkable research by supporting graduate students who delve into pioneering work across various domains relevant to NVIDIA technologies. Recently, the program announced its latest awards, providing up to $60,000 each to ten exceptional Ph.D. students. These selected scholars are engaging in cutting-edge research that touches on all aspects of computing innovation.
Recognizing Excellence in Academia
The competitive nature of the fellowship shines a light on the caliber of talent that NVIDIA seeks to nurture. This year, ten outstanding graduate students emerged from a rigorous application process, showcasing their commitment to advancing fields like autonomous systems, deep learning, computer architecture, and beyond. The fellowship not only provides financial support but also includes a summer internship, allowing recipients to gain firsthand experience within NVIDIA’s innovative environment.
Meet the 2026-2027 Fellowship Recipients
The following talented individuals have been recognized for their exceptional research contributions:
-
Jiageng Mao, University of Southern California
Jiageng focuses on solving intricate physical AI problems by leveraging diverse priors from vast internet-scale data, aiming to enhance the robustness and generalizability of intelligence in real-world embodied agents. -
Liwen Wu, University of California San Diego
Liwen’s research enriches the realism and efficiency of physically-based rendering through innovative approaches like neural materials and neural rendering technologies. -
Manya Bansal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Manya is dedicated to designing programming languages tailored for modern accelerators, allowing developers to write modular, reusable code while maintaining the essential low-level control needed for peak performance. -
Sizhe Chen, University of California, Berkeley
Sizhe embarks on securing AI in real-world applications, focusing on defenses against prompt injection attacks that ensure AI agents remain functional without sacrificing security. -
Yunfan Jiang, Stanford University
Yunfan is developing scalable methodologies to create generalist robots capable of performing everyday tasks, incorporating hybrid data sources that include real-world manipulation and large-scale simulations. -
Yijia Shao, Stanford University
Yijia explores human-agent collaboration, crafting AI agents that seamlessly interact and coordinate with humans during task execution, thus enhancing the overall efficiency and user experience. -
Shangbin Feng, University of Washington
Shangbin’s research advances model collaboration, enabling multiple machine learning models—each trained on different data sets—to work together, fostering a decentralized and collaborative future for AI. -
Shvetank Prakash, Harvard University
Shvetank is pushing the boundaries of hardware architecture by designing AI agents driven by innovative algorithms, curated datasets, and agent-focused infrastructures. -
Irene Wang, Georgia Institute of Technology
Irene focuses on developing a holistic codesign framework that integrates accelerator architecture and network topology, targeting energy-efficient and sustainable AI training on a large scale. - Chen Geng, Stanford University
Chen’s work centers on modeling 4D physical worlds using scalable data-driven algorithms, enhancing physical world understanding for robotics and scientific applications.
Acknowledging Fellow Finalists
In addition to the fellowship recipients, several remarkable candidates were also recognized as finalists for the 2026-2027 fellowship:
- Zizheng Guo, Peking University
- Peter Holderrieth, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Xianghui Xie, Max Planck Institute for Informatics
- Alexander Root, Stanford University
- Daniel Palenicek, Technical University of Darmstadt
These finalists, while not awarded fellowships this year, demonstrate the vast pool of talent and innovation present in the academic realm.
More Read
Broadening Horizons: An Open Invitation
The NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Program proudly offers opportunities to applicants from around the globe. This commitment to inclusivity in pursuing pioneering research underlines NVIDIA’s ethos of fostering innovation and progress across various technological domains.
For aspiring research scholars, the program presents not just financial assistance, but a pathway toward a brighter future in accelerated computing technology. Each recipient embodies the spirit of advancement that NVIDIA champions, positioning themselves at the forefront of a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
Inspired by: Source
