In 2023, the Ken Kennedy Institute awarded $60,000 in Computational Science and Engineering Graduate Recruiting Fellowships to four incoming graduate students across four departments at Rice University.

The goal of the program is to attract outstanding graduate students to Rice in the fields of high performance computing, computational science & engineering, and data science, with special consideration given to students with research interests in areas of relevance to the energy industry. The fellowships are funded by the Ken Kennedy Institute's annual Energy High Performance Computing Conference and the nominating departments of each recipient.

Each enhancement fellowship comes with a $15,000 stipend paid in monthly installments over four years. The graduate students receiving fellowships for the award period of 2023–2027 are:

Alexander Ahrens, Applied Physics
Cesar Cardenas, Statistics
Khushbu Pahwa, Computer Science
Xiaorong Zhang, Electrical & Computer Engineering

With support from the Energy High Performance Computing Conference, industry, and nominating departments, the Ken Kennedy Institute has awarded nearly $1.8 million to 201 graduate students since 2001. In total, the Energy HPC Conference funded 78 of those students for $580,000. More details can be found here.

– The Ken Kennedy Institute