The Ken Kennedy Institute’s annual graduate fellowship program has awarded $65,000 to nine Rice University graduate students.
The 2019-20 recipients, their fellowships and the amounts are:
- Nidish Narayanaa Balaji, mechanical engineering: Kennedy-Cray, $7,500
- Randall Balestriero, electrical and computer engineering (ECE): BP, $7,500
- Ao Cai, earth, environmental and planetary sciences: Shell, $7,500
- Mae Markowski, computational and applied mathematics (CAAM): Shell, $7,500
- Afsaneh Rahbar, computer science (CS): Andrew Ladd, $5,000
- Thomas Roddenberry, ECE: AMD, $7,500
- Christina Taylor, CAAM: BP, $7,500
- Keren Zhou, CS: ExxonMobil, $7,500
- Ye Emma Zohner, statistics: Schlumberger, $7,500
Recipients use fellowship awards to further research pursuits, attend conferences, travel, and develop networking relationships. Many past recipients have spent summers as research interns with sponsoring companies and several work in industry.
An important aspect of the fellowships is presenting research at Rice’s annual Ken Kennedy Institute Oil and Gas High Performance Computing Conference, a gathering of more than 550 leaders from the oil and gas, high-performance computing, data science, and information technology industries, and academics.
With the support of industry and the conference, the Ken Kennedy Institute has awarded almost $1.2 million to more than 135 students since 2002. The graduate fellowships are supported by AMD, BP, ExxonMobil, Schlumberger, and Shell as well as from the Andrew Ladd and Kennedy-Cray endowments.