Texas ECE Ph.D. student Ruisi Cai has received a 2025 NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship. The NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Program provides funding in the amount of up to $60,000 per award to PhD students who are researching topics that will lead to major advances in accelerated computing and its applications. NVIDIA particularly invites submissions from students pushing the envelope in artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous vehicles, and related fields.

Ruisi Cai received her BS from the University of Science and Technology of China in June 2022. She started at Texas ECE in August 2022 under the supervision of Atlas Wang in the Visual Informatics Group. Her research primarily focuses on large language model (LLM) efficiency, reasoning, and AI security, specifically efficient training and inference for large foundation models while enhancing decision-making capabilities. She has been working on optimizing model architectures for faster and more resource-efficient deployment, ensuring flexible and reliable inference, and developing techniques that foster advanced reasoning.