Fengrui Tian Named 2026 Apple Ph.D. Scholar in AIML

Fengrui Tian, doctoral student in Computer and Information Science, has been named a 2026 Apple  Scholar in AIML. Tian, who is mentored by René Vidal, Rachleff University Professor in Electrical and Systems Engineering in Penn Engineering and in Radiology in Penn Medicine, was selected by Apple’s Computer Vision committee from a highly competitive pool of nominees.

The Apple Scholars in AIML Ph.D. fellowship program recognizes exceptional doctoral students who are advancing the state of the art in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and supports them as emerging leaders in the field. Scholars receive funding, mentorship from Apple researchers and opportunities to connect with Apple’s broader research community.

Tian’s work focuses on computer vision and graphics, with an emphasis on developing models that enable machines to perceive, represent and generate complex 3D environments from visual data. His research interests include space generation, dynamic scene understanding and neural representations of visual information.

“Being selected as an Apple Scholar is a tremendous honor,” says Tian. “My work and research direction have benefited greatly from the intellectual freedom, interdisciplinary culture and close mentorship at Penn Engineering. The additional mentorship and resources provided by Apple will further support my research on dynamic world generation and understanding, allowing me to pursue more ambitious directions toward building AI systems that can better perceive and interact with a complex, evolving world.”

As part of the fellowship, Tian will receive support and mentorship from an Apple researcher and opportunities to intern at Apple over the course of the award period.

“The Apple Scholars program will accelerate our lab’s work by providing Fengrui with the flexibility and resources to pursue high-risk, high-reward ideas in 3D scene understanding and generation, and to translate them into robust systems and impactful publications,” says Vidal. “Fengrui’s recent work on DynamicVoyager demonstrates rare technical depth and originality in leveraging learned generative priors to reconstruct and explore perpetual dynamic 3D scenes from a single view, making him poised to drive the next wave of research at the intersection of 3D vision and foundation models.”

The Apple Ph.D. Scholars program aims to support emerging leaders in academic research while fostering collaboration between academia and industry. Read more about the program and see the full list of scholars here.