Celaya receives National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship Award

First-year PhD student earned his B.A. in CAAM from Rice in 2016.

Adrian Celaya

Adrian Celaya, a first-year graduate student in computational and applied mathematics (CAAM) at Rice, has received a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship Award.

The fellowship includes full tuition for three years and a monthly stipend of $3,400, health insurance coverage, a research-related travel budget and $1,500 for non-travel professional development.

Celaya earned his B.A. in CAAM from Rice in 2016. After graduation he commissioned in the Navy and served as the Information System Security Manager aboard the USS Carl Vinson, where he led a team of nine cybersecurity analysts who oversaw a $20 million computer network. He left the Navy in 2020 and went to work as a research assistant in the Department of Imaging Physics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Celaya expects to earn his M.A. in CAAM in 2023 and his Ph.D. in 2026. His advisers are Béatrice Rivière, the Noah G. Harding Chair and Professor of CAAM at Rice, and David Fuentes, assistant professor of imaging physics at MD Anderson.