Purdue grad wins Lilly AI Acceleration Fellowship

Grant's path into AI work was not a straight line. She entered Purdue's Master of Science program without a science, technology, engineering or math background, holding an undergraduate degree in interior design, and built her technical skills through a curriculum that offers both a technical and a non-technical pathway. A course on AI governance shaped how she now thinks about the technology's blind spots, and her women's health clinic project — where generative AI produced a poster featuring only white women and took several iterations to correct — became a concrete example of why data quality matters.

The fellowship itself, run under the Lilly-Purdue 360 initiative, gives Purdue graduates the chance to work on advanced AI applications at Lilly, and Grant found it through a Lilly recruiter at Purdue who encouraged her to apply. She interviewed in March and learned she had been chosen four weeks later, two days before her birthday. During the one-year role she says she is focused on learning as much as she can.

What the fellowship ultimately demonstrates may depend less on the title than on whether Grant's outsider perspective influences how AI adoption and governance are handled at Lilly. Her stated approach — keeping human oversight, setting boundaries, and treating AI as an assistant rather than a crutch — suggests she intends to test that influence rather than assume it.