TLDR: Johns Hopkins University has been selected as one of nine institutions nationwide to participate in Amazon’s new AI PhD Fellowship program. This initiative will provide nearly $68 million in funding over two years to more than 100 doctoral students, with Johns Hopkins supporting seven AI PhD Fellows and three additional fellows through its JHU + Amazon Initiative for Interactive AI (AI2AI). The program focuses on advanced AI research, offering comprehensive support and mentorship from Amazon scientists.
Johns Hopkins University has been named among nine prestigious institutions selected by Amazon for its groundbreaking AI PhD Fellowship program. This significant initiative, announced on November 3, 2025, is set to inject nearly $68 million in funding over two years, supporting over 100 doctoral students across the United States in cutting-edge artificial intelligence research.
In its inaugural year, the program will specifically back seven doctoral students from Johns Hopkins’ Whiting School of Engineering. These fellows will delve into core AI topics, including machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing. Additionally, three new Amazon-funded Whiting School fellows have been announced through the existing JHU + Amazon Initiative for Interactive AI (AI2AI), further strengthening the university’s position in advanced AI research.
The AI PhD Fellows are chosen based on their proposals for research projects that demonstrate the potential for significant societal impact. The comprehensive support package for each fellow includes full tuition, a stipend, fees, a travel grant, and invaluable mentorship from Amazon scientists. They will also receive Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-computing credits to facilitate their computational research.
Ed Schlesinger, Dean of the Whiting School of Engineering, emphasized the dual benefits of the program. ‘The funding will enable our students to explore topics that are at the cutting edge of their areas of inquiry, but it is through mentorship that they’ll learn how to transform their groundbreaking ideas into deployable systems that can enhance people’s lives,’ Schlesinger stated. Each fellow is paired with an Amazon research liaison, a senior scientist whose expertise aligns directly with the student’s work, ensuring tailored guidance.
Rohit Prasad, Senior Vice President and Head Scientist in Amazon’s Artificial General Intelligence, highlighted the collaborative advantage. ‘What makes this program special is how it brings together Amazon’s real-world experience across diverse industries with the fresh perspectives of these top researchers to cultivate the next generation of AI leaders,’ Prasad commented.
The first cohort of Johns Hopkins fellows represents five different engineering departments, with their projects spanning a wide array of applications. Examples include Chuanyang Jin (Computer Science), who is developing AI systems with advanced social intelligence for human-AI coexistence. Other research areas range from data-driven materials discovery for clean energy to enabling large language models to navigate complex cultural and ethical contexts.
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This new fellowship builds upon Amazon’s ongoing support for academic research at Johns Hopkins, complementing the AI2AI initiative launched in 2022. The AI2AI program has already provided funding for faculty research and 17 doctoral fellows in areas such as machine learning, computer vision, natural language understanding, and speech processing. The 2025-2026 AI2AI Fellows include Siyuan Huang (Electrical and Computer Engineering), whose work focuses on AI, computer vision, large language models (LLMs), multimodal learning, and person re-identification, and Yen-Ju Lu (Electrical and Computer Engineering), who is bridging speech and text through multimodal LLMs for reliable spoken language intelligence.
