The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is one of nine universities participating in Amazon’s new AI Ph.D. Fellowship program. The award is a two-year fellowship, and Illinois is currently several months into the second year. The program supports more than 100 Ph.D. students conducting research in core AI disciplines, including machine learning, computer vision and natural language processing.
The initiative includes $10 million in direct student funding, as well as $24 million annually in Amazon Web Services cloud-computing credits. In total, the program represents a $68 million investment across participating universities over two years. Fellowship funding covers tuition, stipends and fees. Each university receives $1.1 million per year, with the number of fellows supported varying based on each institution’s funding structure.
Each Ph.D. fellow is paired with an Amazon mentor — a senior scientist whose expertise aligns with the fellow’s research area. Mentors meet regularly with fellows to provide guidance and explore the real-world applications of their work.
All nine participating universities collaborate with Amazon through initiatives such as the Amazon Hubs program, the Amazon Scholar program, the Amazon Research Awards and related partnerships.
The Illinois program supports 20 students each year. Last summer, 12 of the 20 Illinois Amazon AI Ph.D. fellows interned at Amazon. The students are advised by faculty in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering (ISE), the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and the School of Information Sciences (iSchool).
"This fellowship program provides an extraordinary opportunity for our doctoral students to pursue ambitious, high-impact AI research while engaging directly with industry leaders," said Nancy Amato, Siebel School director and Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering. "By combining academic excellence with real-world perspective, this partnership accelerates innovation and prepares the next generation of AI researchers to tackle some of society's most complex challenges."
This initiative underscores Amazon’s commitment to advancing cutting-edge AI research and strengthening the future innovation pipeline. The program fosters meaningful collaboration between doctoral researchers and Amazon’s scientists and engineers, accelerating progress in artificial intelligence.
Below is a list of the Amazon AI PhD fellows.