Ken Kennedy Institute awards graduate fellowships

The recipients of Ken Kennedy Institute fellowships,, from left, Xiaodi Deng, Jie Hou, Zheng Wang, Shangu Luo, Rajesh Balagam, Javier Villarreal, Lei Fu, Deepak Majeti, Brianna Lynn, Alina Sibrlea, Caleb Magruder, Milind Chabbi, Chaoran Yang and Ryan Luna.

The Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology has awarded $147,500 in fellowship funding to 20 Rice University graduate students to pursue research in computational science and engineering and high-performance computing.

The annual Rice University Oil and Gas High Performance Computing Workshop funded 11 of the fellowships. The other nine were funded by industry through direct support or endowments.

The recipients are Michael Anderson, Rajesh Balagam, C.J. Barberan, Frankie Camacho, Milind Chabbi, Xiaodi Deng, Lei Fu, Jie Hou, Thomas Klotz, Gary Linkevich, Ryan Luna, Shangyu Luo, Brianna Lynn, Caleb Magruder, Deepak Majeti, Minh Nguyen, Alina Sbirlea, Javier Villarreal, Zheng Wang, and Chaoran Yang.

Six of the awards are new “enhanced fellowships” for incoming students, intended to complement Rice’s graduate recruiting program for computational science and engineering and high-performance computing.

“Many graduate students perform research that is important to the energy industry,” said Matthias Heinkenschloss, a professor and chair of the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics. “The enhanced fellowships are a great addition and have already made a difference in this year’s graduate student recruiting.”

Jan Odegard, executive director of the Ken Kennedy Institute, said it has awarded more than $400,000 in fellowships since 2008 and with this year’s awards, the institute manages one of the three-largest graduate fellowship programs at Rice. Typical awards this year were worth $7,500 and are meant to enhance student stipends and encourage students to attend computation-oriented conferences.

Industry supporters include BP, ExxonMobil, Schlumberger, Shell, the Ken Kennedy-Cray Memorial Fellowship Fund and the Andrew Ladd Memorial Excellence Fund.

Learn more about the awards here.

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