The Department of Statistics is proud to announce that Ph.D. student Haoming Shi has earned a Ken Kennedy Institute Graduate Fellowship for the 2025-2026 academic year. His selection marks the first time in four years that a statistics student has received this prestigious honor, highlighting the strength and caliber of research being conducted in the department.
The Ken Kennedy-HPE Cray Fellowship will support Shi's work developing computationally efficient and scalable machine learning methods that address critical challenges in energy systems, high-performance computing, and data analytics. His research focuses on creating cost-effective modeling approaches that are both robust and practical for modern computational applications.
“Haoming works in the field of optimization for machine learning and scientific artificial intelligence, with a research focus on the statistical generalization ability of neural networks and state-of-the-art large language models," said Hengrui Luo, Dobelman Family Assistant Professor of Statistics and Shi's faculty advisor. "He is also devoted to applying statistical theories to interdisciplinary research in biology and spatial statistics. His research greatly advances our understanding of how architecture compression and self-distillation processes affect the performance of learning models, which further helps us develop domain-specific models.”
“I’m incredibly honored and grateful to be selected as a recipient of the Ken Kennedy Fellowship," said Shi. "This award marks a significant milestone in my graduate studies and serves as a meaningful recognition of my work, which encourages me to further advance my research on computationally efficient machine learning methods. I am sincerely thankful to The Ken Kennedy Institute and HPE Cray for their tremendous support, and also to our statistics department, where the guidance from the faculty and support from the staff have been indispensable."
The Ken Kennedy Institute fellowship is among the most competitive graduate awards at Rice University, with an acceptance rate of only 1-2%. Since its inception in 2001, the Institute has awarded 167 sponsored fellowships, totaling over $1.1 million, in partnership with industry leaders to support graduate students pursuing cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, and computational science and engineering.
Shi joins an accomplished group of Rice graduate students whose research is advancing the frontiers of computational science. His recognition reflects both the impact of his research and the growing prominence of statistical and machine learning scholarship within the broader computational sciences community.
The Department of Statistics congratulates Haoming Shi on this outstanding achievement and looks forward to the contributions he will continue to make to the field.
For more information about the Ken Kennedy Institute-sponsored fellowships, visit the Institute’s website.