Every year, NVIDIA recognizes exceptional PhD students worldwide who are pushing the boundaries of accelerated computing. The prestigious Graduate Fellowship Program, now in its 25th year, has named its 2026-2027 recipients, awarding each up to $60,000 and a summer internship to support their groundbreaking research.
Spotlight on the 2026-2027 Fellowship Recipients
This year’s ten awardees distinguished themselves in a highly competitive field, thanks to visionary research in artificial intelligence, robotics, computer architecture, graphics, and security. Their projects embody the vast scope and transformative impact of contemporary computing innovation, all closely aligned with NVIDIA’s mission and technology.
- Jiageng Mao (University of Southern California): Developing robust, generalizable intelligence for embodied agents by leveraging internet-scale data to tackle complex physical AI challenges.
- Liwen Wu (UC San Diego): Advancing neural materials and neural rendering to enhance physically based rendering, making it both more realistic and computationally efficient.
- Manya Bansal (MIT): Creating programming languages for modern accelerators, allowing developers to write reusable code while maintaining essential low-level control for peak performance.
- Sizhe Chen (UC Berkeley): Improving AI security by defending agents against prompt injection attacks without sacrificing practical utility.
- Yunfan Jiang (Stanford): Designing scalable approaches for training generalist robots to perform daily tasks, using hybrid data from real-world manipulation, large-scale simulations, and internet-scale multimodal sources.
- Yijia Shao (Stanford): Enabling human-agent collaboration by developing AI agents capable of effective communication and coordination, supported by innovative interaction interfaces.
- Shangbin Feng (University of Washington): Pioneering collaborative AI and enabling multiple independently trained machine learning models to work together in an open, decentralized environment.
- Shvetank Prakash (Harvard): Innovating hardware architecture and systems design with AI agents powered by new algorithms, custom datasets, and agent-centric infrastructure.
- Irene Wang (Georgia Tech): Building holistic frameworks that integrate accelerator architecture, network topology, and runtime scheduling to achieve sustainable, energy-efficient AI training at scale.
- Chen Geng (Stanford): Modeling complex 4D physical worlds using scalable, data-driven algorithms and physics-inspired methods for robotics and scientific research.
Acknowledging the Finalists
NVIDIA also recognized five distinguished finalists this year, each contributing meaningfully to computing technology’s advancement:
- Zizheng Guo (Peking University)
- Peter Holderrieth (MIT)
- Xianghui Xie (Max Planck Institute for Informatics)
- Alexander Root (Stanford University)
- Daniel Palenicek (Technical University of Darmstadt)
Fellowship Program Impact
The NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Program stands out for its global reach and its role in directly supporting the next generation of computing thought leaders. By combining substantial financial support with hands-on internship experience, NVIDIA empowers these students to advance research that will influence the future of technology, from AI and robotics to secure systems and sustainable computing.
Conclusion
As computing evolves at a rapid pace, initiatives like NVIDIA’s Graduate Fellowship Program are essential for fostering the talent and ideas that will shape tomorrow’s innovations. This year’s fellows exemplify creative and technical excellence, promising exciting developments for both academia and the tech industry.
NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship: Honoring the 2026-2027 Pioneers in Computing