Three doctoral students at Rice University have earned National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship Awards. All the Rice winners are in the Department of Computational Applied Mathematics and Operations Research (CMOR).
The recipients are Adrian Celaya and Dane Grundvig (2022 recipients), and Alejandro Diaz (2021 recipient). The fellowships include full tuition for three years and a monthly stipend of $3,400, health insurance coverage, a research-related travel budget and $1,500 for non-travel professional development.
“These fellowships funded by the U.S. Department of Defense are highly competitive and very prestigious. That all of this year’s winners come from our department says something about the excellence of our graduate students and about our department’s ability to attract the best young scholars,” said Béatrice Rivière, the Noah Harding Chair and Professor of CMOR.
Celaya earned his B.A. in computational and applied mathematics (CAAM) from Rice in 2016. After graduation he commissioned in the Navy and served as the Information System Security Manager aboard the USS Carl Vinson, where he led a team of nine cybersecurity analysts who oversaw a $20 million computer network. He left the Navy in 2020 and went to work as a research assistant in the Department of Imaging Physics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Celaya expects to earn his M.A. in CAAM in 2023 and his Ph.D. in 2026. His advisers are Rivière and David Fuentes, associate professor of Imaging Physics at MD Anderson.
Diaz earned his B.S. from the University of Maryland in mathematics in 2019 and his M.A. in CAAM from Rice in 2022. He expects to earn his Ph.D. in CAAM from Rice in 2024. His adviser is Matthias Heinkenschloss, the Noah Harding Chair and Professor of CMOR.
Grundvig earned his B.S. in applied and computational mathematics in 2018 and his M.S. in mathematics in 2020, both from Brigham Young University. He expects to earn his M.A. in CAAM in 2023 and his Ph.D. in CAAM in 2026. Heinkenschloss is his doctoral adviser.
The NDSEG Fellowship Program is sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Army Research Office, and the Office of Naval Research, under the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, and is administered by Innovative Technology Solutions.