The Ken Kennedy Institute’s (KKI) annual graduate fellowship program has awarded $50,000 to seven Rice graduate students, including computer science doctoral student Jiarong Xing. Xing was the recipient of The Andrew Ladd Memorial Excellence in Computer Science Fellowship which helps students pursue further research.
Every year, the Andrew Ladd Memorial Fund grants $5,000 to a well qualified graduate student in Computer Science. In addition to pursuing research, KKI fellowship recipients use awards to attend conferences, travel and develop networking relationships in industry. Past recipients have spent summers as research interns with sponsoring companies.
An important aspect of the fellowships is presenting research at KKI’s annual Oil and Gas High Performance Computing Conference, a gathering of more than 500 leaders and experts in high-performance computing, computational science and engineering, machine learning and data science.
Xing's fellowship was made possible by the Andrew Ladd Memorial Excellence Fund in Computer Science, established in honor of the late Dr. Andrew Ladd by his parents Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Ladd, his sister Ms. Kelly Ladd, and his widow Dr. Fumiko Chino. Andrew Ladd excelled in his studies at Rice University and received his M.S. and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Rice University, Houston, Texas in 2003 and 2006, respectively.
With the support of industry and the conference, the KKI has awarded more than $1.3 million to 160 students since 2001. In addition to Andew Ladd's computer science endowment, the 2020-21 graduate fellowships are supported by BP, ExxonMobil, Schlumberger, the Oil and Gas High Performance Computing Conference, and the Ken Kennedy-Cray endowments.
Other 2020-21 fellowship recipients include:
- Alejandro Diaz, computational and applied mathematics: BP, $7,500
- Boning Li, electrical and computer engineering (ECE): Ken Kennedy-Cray, $7,500
- Huiming Lin, statistics: OG-HPC Conference, $7,500
- Tharun Medini, ECE: BP, $7,500
- Thomas (Mitch) Roddenberry, ECE: ExxonMobil, $7,500
- Ivan Rosa de Siqueira, chemical and biomolecular engineering: Schlumberger, $7,500
To read more about Andrew Ladd and his work, click here.
--Patrick Kurp, Engineering Communications