At Mercor, we connect graduate-level experts with meaningful, well-paid work that leverages their domain knowledge, while providing AI labs with access to our highly specialized and trusted network of talent. The experts on our platform train frontier AI models using their domain expertise by developing discipline-specific prompts, evaluating responses, and delivering high-quality human feedback across fields ranging from law, linguistics, engineering, and medicine.

For many graduate students and alumni, it’s both a valuable opportunity to apply their skills at the cutting edge of technology and a way to monetize their expertise without leaving academia behind. To invest in the future of academic research and human insight, we launched the Mercor Graduate Fellowship to support outstanding graduate students who are on-track to do exceptional work in their field.

This year, we received over 2,000 applications from across the country and are proud to announce our 50 finalists and two fellowship winners:

Neil Band, a Rhodes Scholar and third-year Computer Science PhD student at Stanford

Mireya Gonzales-Rivera, an incoming Physics PhD student at UC Berkeley, graduated from CSU San Marcos

The fellowship comes with a $50,000 grant and public recognition as part of our commitment to supporting graduate researchers and unlocking access to opportunity.

Meet the 2025 Winners

Neil Band
Neil is a third-year Computer Science PhD student at Stanford and a former Rhodes Scholar. His research focuses on making large language models more trustworthy and reliable, tackling problems such as hallucination, uncertainty calibration, and reasoning in LLMs. He currently works in one of Stanford’s top AI research labs, exploring how statistical thinking can be applied to modern generative systems.

With the support of this fellowship, Neil plans to take on more ambitious research, further contributing to the future of safe and reliable AI.



Mireya Gonzales-Rivera
Mireya earned her bachelor’s in applied physics from California State University, San Marcos, where she conducted undergraduate research in quantum nanoelectronics and silicon-based qubit architectures. This fall, she’s beginning her Physics PhD at UC Berkeley, with a focus on quantum information science.

Mireya aims to build a lab that expands access to research and mentorship for underrepresented students in STEM. Her passion for equity, mentorship, and scientific discovery made her stand out in this year’s applicant pool as a clear example of undiscovered talent.

A Platform Built for Academic Talent

Through our platform, thousands of PhDs and postdocs are already contributing to advancements in AI and getting paid well for it. For some, it’s a full-time career path. For others, it’s a part-time opportunity to apply their expertise beyond the lab.
Whether through work or funding, our mission remains the same: to support graduate researchers, amplify their impact, and help them shape the future.