Apple Scholars

Changing the world for the better.

Apple is committed to supporting the academic research community and its invaluable contributions to the world. We offer fellowships, scholarships and awards to postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers who are harnessing the power of technology to help people and the planet.

Meet the Apple Scholars.

Ethics and Technology

Postdoctoral fellowships

Apple University, in a joint programme with Stanford University’s McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, hosts postdoctoral fellows whose research focuses on issues at the intersection of ethics and technology.

Abby Jaques

Ethics and Politics of Technology
Stanford University

Abby is focused on the big questions at the intersection of human and artificial intel­ligence: What does it take to get tech right? And how do we make sure the technologies we build are good for everyone?

At MIT, Abby developed a new theory of the nature of intentional action. Now she is focused on how artificial intelligence can affect human behaviour and its potential moral and political impacts. She has also developed a new, practice-based method of ethics for engineers, and she contributed to a series of grant-funded efforts aimed at democratising AI through formal and informal education.

Hardware Technologies, Integrated Circuit Engineering, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

PhD fellowships

Awarded to emerging leaders pursuing research in areas related to electrical engineering, computer engineering and computer science with a focus on cutting-edge technology and Apple core values.

McKenzie van der Hagen

Hardware Support for Encrypted Computing
Carnegie Mellon University

McKenzie is working on novel computer architectures that would allow low-power IoT devices to participate in encrypted computing at the edge.

An enormous amount of data is collected and processed at every moment through Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It takes a lot of power to protect the privacy of everyone using connected technology. One way to address privacy in the world of IoT is through homomorphic encryption techniques, which enable computation directly on encrypted data. But that takes complex mathematics and huge data structures. McKenzie’s work aims to develop specialised computer architectures to support these massive operations within the modest constraints of low-power IoT devices. Ultimately she hopes to take the concept of encrypted computing from optimistic theory to practical reality through hardware support.

Jaya Narain

AI for Health and Wellness
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Jaya is using personalised machine learning and naturalistic data to help children with non-verbal autism spectrum disorder (ASD) communicate with the world around them.

Of the 3.5 million people in the United States who have ASD, about 30 per cent are non-verbal. But that doesn’t mean they don’t communicate. Parents and caregivers can often interpret vocalisations, gestures and differences in tone that may be missed by others. Jaya is using the knowledge that primary caregivers have to train machine learning models to help interpret non-verbal cues. She hopes that her research can have a profound impact on how children with non‑verbal autism navigate their space and communicate with new people.

Hardware Technologies and Integrated Circuit Engineering

Master’s scholarships

Awarded to outstanding students completing their master’s degrees in advanced hardware technologies and specialising in computer architecture, system-on-chip design, verification and validation.

Anna Li

Electrical and Computer Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University

Anna began her academic journey at Carnegie Mellon doing what all her peers were doing: pursuing software. However, she soon found herself far more invested in the hardware beneath.

Anna’s interest shifted from software to hardware during her first hardware course, Structure and Design of Digital Systems. She found that even though hardware description was entirely different from programming, she was still able to use her strengths: logic, problem-solving and developing algorithms. Now she is doing what she feels she was meant to do — working at the intersection of hardware and software.

Stay tuned.
There’s more to come.

The Apple Scholars programme is currently invitation-only. Check back to find out more as the programme expands. And to learn more about students who believe in the power of technology, share our values, and are passionate about making the world a better place.