Diaz awarded Ken Kennedy Institute graduate fellowship

Fellowships support research, conferences, travel and networking.

Alejandro Diaz

The Ken Kennedy Institute’s annual graduate fellowship program has awarded $50,000 to seven Rice graduate students in five departments.

Alejandro Diaz, a second-year PhD student in computational and applied mathematics, received the 2020-21 BP fellowship in the amount of $7,500.

Recipients use fellowship awards to further research pursuits, 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 Ken Kennedy Institute’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.

With the support of industry and the conference, the Ken Kennedy Institute has awarded more than $1.3 million to 160 students since 2001. The 2020-21 graduate fellowships are supported by BP, ExxonMobil, Schlumberger, the Oil and Gas High Performance Computing Conference, and the Andrew Ladd and Ken Kennedy-Cray endowments.