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Johns Hopkins’ Amandeep Kumar selected for Amazon’s inaugural AI PhD Fellowship
The two-year program, launched by Amazon, will fund more than 100 doctoral students across nine U.S. universities.
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Pranavi Sharma - Tue, 04, Nov 2025
- 00:37 EST
- 30
Amandeep Kumar. / Johns Hopkins
Amandeep Kumar, an Indian-origin doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University, is among seven PhD candidates selected for the inaugural Amazon AI PhD Fellowship, a $68 million initiative supporting advanced research in artificial intelligence.
The two-year program, launched by Amazon, will fund more than 100 doctoral students across nine U.S. universities, including Johns Hopkins, Stanford, MIT, and the University of California, Berkeley.
Kumar, a second-year PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is a member of the Visual Intelligence and Understanding (VIU) Lab, advised by Dr. Vishal Patel. His research focuses on computer vision and generative AI, particularly improving the efficiency of long-form video generation.
Before joining Johns Hopkins, Kumar worked as a researcher in computer vision at the IVAL Lab of Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in the United Arab Emirates. He also interned at the SketchX Lab at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom and earned his bachelor’s degree in Information Technology from West Bengal University of Technology.
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According to the university, the Amazon AI PhD Fellows were chosen for research proposals with potential for significant societal impact. The fellowship provides tuition, a stipend, fees, travel grants, and mentorship from Amazon scientists, as well as cloud-computing credits through Amazon Web Services.
Ed Schlesinger, dean of the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins, said the mentorship component is vital to the program’s success.
“The funding will enable our students to explore topics that are at the cutting edge of their areas of inquiry,” Schlesinger said. “But it is through mentorship that they'll learn how to transform their groundbreaking ideas into deployable systems that can enhance people's lives.”
Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and head scientist for Artificial General Intelligence at Amazon, said the collaboration benefits both academia and industry.
“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 said.
The first cohort of Johns Hopkins AI PhD Fellows represents five engineering departments, with research spanning from data-driven materials discovery for clean energy to the ethical challenges of large language models.
The fellowship expands Amazon’s ongoing partnership with Johns Hopkins through the JHU + Amazon Initiative for Interactive AI, which since 2022 has funded faculty research and 17 doctoral fellows in fields such as computer vision and natural language understanding.
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