Nigerian wins award, fellowship in US

A United States-based Nigerian scholar, Taiwo Adebiyi, has been recognised as the recipient of the 2025–2026 Andrea Prosperetti Research Computing Student Award.

He was recognised last week at the Spring Faculty and Staff Meeting of the Cullen College of Engineering at the University of Houston.

Adebiyi, a doctoral candidate and research assistant at Uncertainty Quantification Lab, Civil and Environmental Engineering in the university, was also selected for the 2026–2027 SCIPE Chishiki AI in Civil Engineering Graduate Fellowship.

The fellowship was administered by the University of Texas at Austin.

This was contained in a statement at the UH Uncertainty Quantification Lab website seen by Diaspora Tales on Thursday.

“This annual award recognises one graduate student or postdoctoral researcher who has made outstanding contributions to research in scientific computing, data science, high-performance computing, and their applications,” the statement read.

He received the award for his work on Transverse Section-roots, a new algorithmic and software framework for efficient and exact Gaussian Process Thompson Sampling in Bayesian optimisation.

“The fellowship provides a $37,000 stipend, up to $12,000 in tuition allowance, travel support, computing access, and mentorship through the Chishiki AI network.

“This summer, Taiwo will join Los Alamos National Laboratory as an Advancing Machine Learning for Scientific Discovery Fellow, a 10-week internship in Los Alamos, New Mexico,” it added.