Meet the 2026 Google PhD Fellows

Nov 12, 2026

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Google.org is providing $13 million in funding to support the 2026 Google PhD Fellows — backing exceptional early-career scientists around the world with the funding, compute, and community to turn bold foundational questions into breakthroughs.

Leslie Yeh

Director, Scientific Progress, Google.org

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Today, we are announcing the recipients of the 2026 Google PhD Fellowship Program. This year, Google.org is providing $13 million in funding to support fellowship recipients, including 148 new PhD fellows across 38 countries, deepening our commitment to the early-career scientists who are advancing the "science of AI" for the public good.

The 2026 Google PhD Fellowship cohort has broad global reach, with representation across 38 countries.

Foundational science with global reach

Every transformative leap in technology begins the same way: with a researcher asking a bold, foundational question long before the rest of the world sees the answer. What makes this cohort extraordinary isn’t just the technical depth of their work, but the global reach and real-world ambition behind it. Around the world, these fellows are tackling problems that matter to communities everywhere:

• Accelerating health and life sciences: From developing representation-learning frameworks in Brazil that integrate complex genetic data to uncover disease causes, to making medical-imaging neural networks more interpretable and reliable in South Africa.
• Building inclusive, resilient systems: From advancing natural language processing and speech recognition for Nigerian languages, to co-designing accessible security and privacy tools for Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities in Germany.
• Pushing the frontiers of AI and computer hardware: From designing faster microchips that process data more efficiently in Taiwan, to creating reliable, step-by-step reasoning for language models and testing quantum theory in the lab.

Direct funding and lifelong community

Breakthrough science rarely happens in isolation. Beyond direct funding and access to compute which gives students the freedom to pursue high-risk, high-reward ideas, every fellow gains access to engage with Google researchers, and is welcomed into a global scientific peer network.

Since 2009, the PhD Fellowship Program has supported more than 1,100 graduate students worldwide. Over the past 17 years, we have seen firsthand where that early catalyst can lead. Alumni of the program are now tenured professors, startup founders, open-source pioneers, and research leaders helping shape technology at Google itself.

When we support foundational science and the emerging researchers brave enough to chart the unknown, we help build a stronger, more representative global scientific landscape for everyone. Congratulations to the 2026 Google PhD Fellows. Explore the full list of 2026 recipients.

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