The 2026-2027 NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship winners have been announced, with Chinese scholars claiming 8 out of the 10 prestigious spots, each receiving up to $60,000 in funding. Among the recipients are students of renowned mentors, including Fei-Fei Li, whose research focuses on teaching robots to perform human-like tasks. Their work spans cutting-edge fields like neural rendering for gaming graphics and AI security defenses.
The NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship, now in its 25th year, supports top doctoral students in advancing computational innovation. Beyond financial support, recipients gain access to summer internships at NVIDIA labs, offering hands-on experience with cutting-edge technology and industry experts.
**Recipients:** 1. **Jiageng Mao** (University of Southern California) Research: Physical AI, embodied intelligence, autonomous driving. Focuses on leveraging large-scale data to solve real-world AI challenges.
2. **Liwen Wu** (UC San Diego) Research: Neural rendering, computer graphics, 3D vision. Aims to enhance realism and efficiency in rendering.
3. **Manya Bansal** (MIT) Research: Computer architecture, compilers, programming languages. Develops modular programming systems for hardware accelerators.
4. **Sizhe Chen** (UC Berkeley) Research: AI security, adversarial machine learning. Works on defenses against prompt injection attacks in large language models.
5. **Yunfan Jiang** (Stanford University) Research: Robotics, embodied intelligence, simulation. Develops scalable methods for training general-purpose robots.
6. **Yijia Shao** (Stanford University) Research: Human-AI collaboration, NLP. Designs interactive AI systems for task execution.
7. **Shangbin Feng** (University of Washington) Research: NLP, decentralized AI. Promotes collaborative, open AI ecosystems.
8. **Shvetank Prakash** (Harvard University) Research: Edge computing, hardware architecture. Optimizes AI deployment on resource-constrained devices.
9. **Irene Wang** (Georgia Tech) Research: Computer architecture, ML systems. Develops energy-efficient AI training frameworks.
10. **Chen Geng** (Stanford University) Research: 3D/4D vision, generative models. Advances physics-based world modeling for robotics.
**Finalists:** Five additional scholars, including Zizheng Guo (Peking University) and Peter Holderrieth (MIT), were recognized as honorable mentions.
**Trends:** This year’s awards highlight NVIDIA’s shift toward embodied AI and AI safety, reflecting industry priorities like real-world robotics and secure AI deployment.