The Siebel Scholars Foundation announced its 2027 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.
Written by Hannah Gainer
The Siebel Scholars Foundation announced its 2027 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.
Henry CheHenry Che is pursuing a master’s degree in computer science under Professor Shenlong Wang. His research focuses on enabling the trustworthy deployment of robots and autonomous systems in open-world environments. Che’s work explores scalable and controllable simulation to expand the scenarios where robots can be trained and tested, as well as uncertainty awareness to help autonomous systems remain robust in unfamiliar situations. His research has been published at leading robotics and machine learning conferences, including the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) and the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL). Che has held research positions at Waabi and Nvidia and received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 2025. Outside the lab, he co-founded the Special Interest Group in Robotics at Illinois to make robotics more accessible to undergraduates through hands-on projects, technical lectures and industry engagement. He has also served as a teaching assistant for several robotics courses, mentoring undergraduate and graduate students in autonomous systems and machine learning.
Pengrui Han
Pengrui Han is a Master of Science student in computer science. He conducts research under the advisement of Professor Jiaxuan You. His research explores the scientific understanding of both artificial and natural intelligence, with a focus on mechanistic interpretability, the behavioral and psychometric evaluation of large language models (LLMs), and brain-large language model alignment. He is also a visiting researcher in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a student research intern at the Princeton Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab. Previously, Han was a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) with the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF) and interned at Nvidia. His research has been published at leading venues including the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) and the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), and he received a Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Workshop Best Paper Honorable Mention. He has served as a teaching assistant for computer science courses at Illinois, including database systems, data mining and artificial intelligence, while also mentoring undergraduate students in research and helping them develop independent projects and publications. Through his research, teaching and community involvement, Han hopes to advance a deeper scientific understanding of intelligence while helping build AI systems and research communities that are more robust, responsible and inclusive.
Tony HongTony Hong is a Master of Science student in computer science. He conducts research under the guidance of Professor Fan Lai. He received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on machine learning systems, distributed systems, operating systems and storage systems, with an emphasis on developing efficient, scalable infrastructure for artificial intelligence and serving large language models. His research contributions span leading systems conferences, including the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM), Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) and the Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), and have earned him a nomination to join Sigma Xi, the international scientific research honor society. He also created a 14-week iOS development course for more than 200 students and led undergraduate systems research reading groups to introduce students to foundational research concepts. At Illinois, Hong is a founding member of Lab2Launch, an organization that helps graduate students translate academic research into startups, and mentors undergraduate students through Computer Science Advancing Research for Graduate Students (CS(ARGS)), as well as high school and undergraduate researchers through Algoverse. He also serves as lead teaching assistant for an upper-level cloud computing course, leading a team of eight teaching assistants supporting more than 500 students.
Melissa ShiMelissa Shi, who is pursuing her master’s degree in computer science under Professor Koustuv Saha, focuses her research on human-computer interaction, AI and human well-being. Her work explores how human-centered AI systems can support mental health, digital well-being and caregiving, with particular emphasis on designing empathetic and socially responsible technologies. Her research includes developing AI-powered mental health chatbots for caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, as well as WellScreen, a digital self-awareness system that helps users reflect on their smartphone habits and improve their relationship with technology. Her ongoing master’s thesis investigates an AI-assisted well-being ecosystem that integrates caregivers, clinicians, behavioral sensing and personalized interventions to support family caregivers and reduce burnout. Her work has been published or accepted at leading academic venues, including the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, and ACM Health. Beyond her research, Shi has served as a teaching assistant for Database Systems, where she mentored students and has also gained industry experience at a startup.
Caroline Stoklosinski Caroline Stoklosinski is a Master of Science student in computer science, where she conducts research in the Parasol Lab under the guidance of Professor Nancy Amato. Her research focuses on computer vision and machine learning for robotic manipulation, specifically developing a pipeline that enables robots to learn complex, multistep tasks from human demonstrations. Her work involves designing custom 3D convolutional neural networks to recognize actions in video and developing methods to identify action boundaries, allowing unstructured human demonstrations to be translated into data that robots can use to learn new skills. Before joining the graduate program, Stoklosinski gained industry experience as a data engineer intern at John Deere, a data analyst at BMO Bank N.A., and a software engineering intern at Kohler Co., where she developed automation tools and an AI-powered training pipeline for manufacturing processes. She also held several leadership positions in EntreCORPS Consulting Club, eventually managing a team of eight engineers, and she led undergraduate engineering teams at Develop for Good, where she helped build a web platform supporting more than 200 chapters and 4,000 users. At Illinois, Stoklosinski served as a graduate assistant at The Career Center, delivering more than 100 career development presentations and providing individualized student advising, as well as a course assistant at Siebel School for CS 437.
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 and Italy.
Nancy Amato is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of computer science and is director of the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. Nancy Amato holds the Abel Bliss professorship appointment.