The National Center for Supercomputing Applications awarded Fiddler Innovation Fellowships to 38 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and NCSA graduate students in a ceremony on October 31 honoring their outstanding achievements and interdisciplinary contributions to NCSA programs, including Students Pushing Innovation (SPIN), NCSA’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program titled “The Future of Discovery: Training Students to Build and Apply Open Source Machine Learning Models and Tools” (REU FoDoMMaT), Design for America (DFA) and those who worked with NCSA-affiliated faculty during the 2024-25 academic year and summer of 2025.
The awards are part of a $2 million endowment from Jerry Fiddler and Melissa Alden to the University of Illinois in support of student and faculty interdisciplinary research initiatives through the Illinois Emerging Digital Research and Education in Arts Media (eDream) Institute at NCSA.
The 38 awardees represent students whose outstanding interdisciplinary contributions to their projects showcased a wide range of research interests and domains, including environmental sustainability, music, personalized nutrition, agriculture and astronomy. Read full article here.