Five CS Graduate Students Named 2026 Siebel Scholars

The Siebel Scholars Foundation announced its 2026 Siebel Scholars Award recipients. The five students from The Grainger College of Engineering Siebel School of Computing and Data Science were selected in the Graduate Schools of Computer Science category and are in the Master of Science Computer Science program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Xuying Ning, currently studying with professor Jingrui He, completed her undergraduate work in AI from Xi’an Jiaotong University where she graduated with honors. She enrolled at the age of 15 through the Honors Youth Program of Qian Xuesen Honors College. Xuying was part of the AI Experimental Class and the Elite Program. She was also recognized with the Outstanding Student Award and the MEGVII Scholarship, awarded to the top 3% of students in AI. Her research focuses on Graph4MM Multimodal Learning with Structural Information for which the full research paper, where she served as first author, was accepted to the Forty-Second International Conference on Machine Learning. Another area of Xuying’s research is Coarse-to-Fine Autoregressive Recommendation via Structured Tokenization which is under review at the Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. Xuying was an executive member of the XJTU Student Union where she led projects that targeted broader student well-being and initiated a peer-to-peer mental health hotline to address rising academic pressure. She also designed and taught a curriculum for introducing genetic engineering and basic biology concepts to children whose parents had migrated to urban centers for work.

Madhav Jivrajani, advised by professor Aishwarya Ganesan and co-advisor, professor Ram Alagappan, earned his undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Engineering from PES University. Madhav started an initiative called Project Haasil providing affordable web-based learning to the suburbs of Bangalore, India. He was a top contributor, among more than 100,000 worldwide, to the Kubernetes project in India, becoming a Maintainer and a Technical Lead for the project. For his work, he was awarded the Kubernetes Contributor Award and Google Open Source Peer Bonus Award. He has mentored through the Linux Foundation Mentorship Program and the Google Summer of Code program. As a part of the top 20% of students in Computer Science and Engineering at PES, he received the Professor M.R. Doreswamy Merit Scholarship Award. His research focuses on Distributed, Linearly Scalable and I/O Efficient Vector Indexes Using RDMA. His research and contributions enabled him to speak at prestigious conferences KubeCon + CloudNativeCon and GopherCon, the latter of which he was nominated for a conference chair position.

Yulie Arad, advised by professor Nancy M. Amato, earned her Bachelor of Science in Mathematics & Computer Science from Illinois. Her research focuses on advanced algorithms in the fields of motion planning for robotics and computational geometry, as well as driving improvements in robotic navigation and obstacle avoidance. She is the head of research for Quant, the Illinois quantitative trading club, overseeing a team of fifteen Illinois student who develop algorithmic trading strategies. Beyond academics, Yulie organized a team of Illinois student volunteers to make coding accessible to grades K-12 through music-based coding exercises. She also volunteers at Solidarity Gardens, a space providing locally grown food to benefit the community.

Hanning Zhang, advised by professor Tong Zhang, completed his undergraduate work at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology where he received First Class Honors. Hanning’s research at Illinois has focused on LLM Reasoning, Reinforcement Learning, and Optimization. During his undergraduate studies, his research included Hallucination and Alignment for LLMs and Information Propagation Pattern Discovery in Social Media. He received the Outstanding Paper Award at NAACL for his collaboration on the publication “R-Tuning: Instructing Large Language Models to Say ‘I Don’t Know.’” Outside of his academic pursuits, Hanning was a peer mentor in Hong Kong for Mainland students adjusting to a new language and academic culture.

Junyu Zhang, currently studying with professor Huan Zhang, earned an undergraduate degree in AI from Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Junyu’s research interests include Reinforcement Learning, LLMs, Embodied AI, and Trustworthy Machine Learning. She received both the Outstanding Graduate Honor and the Outstanding Undergraduate Student Award. She earned second prize in the World Robot Contest-BCI Brain Control Robot Contest. She is the recipient of the Freshman Self-Improvement scholarship, Excellent Academic scholarship, and the Science and Technology Innovation scholarship. She also won third in the Seventeenth C Programming Language contest and honorable mention in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling. Outside of her academic pursuits, she won first for Individual Events in the School Spring Sports Meeting and second in the Badminton event at the Fourth Sports Teaching Lass Student Sports Skills Competition.

Each year, the Siebel Foundation names almost 80 esteemed students Siebel Scholars, an award which culls exceptional students from 16 universities in the United States, China, France, Italy, and Japan via a competitive review process by deans at the respective schools based on outstanding academic achievement and demonstrated leadership. The top graduate students from 27 partner programs receive a $35,000 award toward their final year of studies. Now in its 25^th year, the program has named more than 2,000 Siebel Scholars.

Grainger Engineering Affiliations

Jingrui He is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of information sciences in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. She is also affiliated with Center for Digital Agriculture (CDA), National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Illinois Informatics, and Mayo Clinic Arizona. She is the director of iSAIL Lab.

Aishwarya Ganesan is an Illinois Grainger Engineering assistant professor of computer science in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. She is also affiliated with VMware Research Group. Ganesan was awarded Best Paper at the 30^th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles and the Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Ram Alagappan is an Illinois Grainger Engineering assistant professor of computer science at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. Alagappan was awarded Best Paper at the 30^th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles and Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) from the National Science Foundation (NSF). He holds the NetApp Faculty Fellowship.

Nancy M. Amato is an Illinois Grainger professor of computer science and the Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering at Siebel School of Computing and Data Science as well as director of the Siebel School. Amato is affiliated with the Computing Research Association (CRA) as past board chair and is president elect of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Robotics and Automation Society (RAS). She holds fellows with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial intelligence (AAAI), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers IEEE, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Tong Zhang is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of computer science in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. He holds the American Statistical Association (ASA) Fellow, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) Fellow appointments.

Huan Zhang is an Illinois Grainger Engineering assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is also affiliated with Siebel School of Computing and Data Science and Coordinated Science Laboratory. He holds the Schmidt Futures AI2050 Early Career Fellowship appointment.