The Siebel Scholars Foundation named 19 Stanford graduate students as 2025 Siebel Scholars for their exceptional work in the fields of computer science, bioengineering, business and energy science. 

The Siebel Scholar award recognizes talented graduate students with a $35,000 award, providing compensation for students to continue spearheading their personalized projects and passions in the hopes they make genuine impacts in their respective fields.  

Suzannah Wistreich ’25 M.S. ’26, one of the awardees, switched majors from psychology to computer science as an undergrad after learning about the links between human and artificial intelligence. Her work in two projects around developing force-based tactile sensors for multimodal data led her to win the award.

“When I was working in the cognitive science lab, I found out that a lot of the questions we’re asking about human intelligence are the same questions researchers want to know about in artificial intelligence (AI),” Wistreich said.

After looking further into this, Wistreich started to work at the Stanford Vision Learning Lab alongside various professors and peers to research the fundamentals of AI software. Her research focused primarily on two projects: one developing a device for broader sensory data in AI and the other formulating a tactile sensor on robots. 

“[We] are addressing the gaps between human ability [for intuition] and how robots are able to [detect things],” Wistreich said. 

While humans are typically able to detect things with multiple senses, including sight, sound, smell and taste, this type of intelligence has not yet been mimicked in AI. Wistreich hopes to replicate the multimodal data from human intelligence to further develop AI. 

Vivian Zhong Ph.D. ’26, another awardee, works in plant synthetic biology. By observing certain cells and reactions within plants, Zhong and her coworkers make alterations to these plants to control the production of cells. 

Zhong’s early biology classes inspired her to be curious about genetic modification and biofortification, as well as the policy side of science.

 “The intrinsic motivation is curiosity,” Zhong said. “The bioengineering department at Stanford is quite flexible, so you can join basically any lab you want.” 

 While the award recognizes passionate individuals in their fields, it also seeks out inspirational leaders. Maxine Vainio MBA ’26 seeks to fulfill this vision in her work studying consumer psychology. 

“I love consumer psychology,” Vainio said. “At Stanford, I’ve taken a lot of coaching classes so I can become someone who can empower others.” 

After graduating from Yale University, Vainio spent several years working for Dior, McKinsey and Chanel. Each company exposed her to unique perspectives on consumer relations, communication and marketing. Now, she is pursuing a master of business administration (MBA) at Stanford to build off of her work experience and empower herself further.

 “All the top executives have their MBA, it’s almost like a pre-qualification. I just wanted to make sure I would always be in the running,” Vainio said. “I had always seen the industry side, but I wanted the business foundations so that I could read the financial statements and have confidence in the future when I’m a leader.”

In her second year at the Graduate School of Business (GSB), Vainio plans to enroll in various classes about leadership and coaching, blending her experience with industry and people. To her, the Siebel Scholarship is an “honorable opportunity” to blend with a new community of innovative leaders from across disciplines. 

Akshay Rao Ph.D. ’26 took a different path with his extensive research in thermodynamics, computational math and scientific computing. After pursuing his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering at Purdue University, Rao is now working on a Ph.D. examining nontraditional water processes. After years of hands-on experience in machine learning, his time in academia reflects a genuine passion for addressing decarbonization. 

 “Broadly, my colleagues and I are interested in industrial decarbonization, trying to decarbonize heavy industry,” Rao said. “About a quarter of U.S. energy consumption is from industrial processes.”

Regardless, Rao encourages students to similarly look to the future as a challenge to be tackled. 

“I would say try to find a problem that’s really hard to solve and go find the people that are working on that,” Rao said. “There are a lot of hard problems out there and a lot of smart people at Stanford.”