NVIDIA DLI University Ambassador Program

Enhance your AI, data science, and accelerated computing curriculum with access to GPUs, course materials, and hands-on training.

Bring World-Class Education to Your University

Open up a new world of opportunity for you, your students, and your academic community with the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute (DLI) University Ambassador Program. As an Ambassador you can bring instructor-led workshops in cutting-edge technologies—AI, accelerated computing, data science, and more—to your university, enriching your curriculum and giving your students the skills they need to jumpstart their future.

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DLI Ambassador Spotlights

Dr. Sina Mostafanejad

Lead Software Scientist

Dr. Sina Mostafanejad

The Molecular Sciences Software Institute, Virginia Tech, USA

Meet Dr. Sina Mostafanejad, our first Platinum Certified Instructor in the US. He has delivered 8 DLI workshops and trained more than 300 students across multiple scientific disciplines.

Read His Story
Peng Jia

Associate Professor, College of Physics and Optoelectronics

Peng Jia

Taiyuan University of Technology, China

Peng Jia has trained over 800 students, making him one of our most active University Ambassadors in China.

Read His Story
Manual Ujaldon Martinez

Full Professor

Manuel Ujaldon Martinez

Universidad de Malaga, Spain

Manuel Ujaldon is one of our most experienced and well-known instructors. Since 2012, he has taught more than 100 CUDA workshops and tutorials worldwide.  

Read His Story

DLI Ambassador Program

DLI Workshop and Content Enablement

DLI Workshop and Content Enablement

  • Bring world-class training to your academic community in a variety of settings—from the classroom to academic conference

  • Access to the Ambassador Workshop Event Kit “train the trainer” content and workshop promotion  assets

  • Early access to new DLI Teaching Kits and free, cloud-based GPU platforms for students in your courses
DLI Instructor-Certification Awards and Incentives

Instructor-Certification Awards and Incentives

  • Free DLI instructor-certification, a $1,000 value

  • Workshop-specific instructor certificates  to demonstrate your expertise  for career growth and development

  • A special Ambassador certificate recognizing your DLI University Ambassador Program membership

  • The opportunity to achieve one or more DLI instructor specializations in a series of related workshops

  • The opportunity to purchase DLI workshops at a discount and resell/instruct them to industry and professional continuing-education customers

  • Additional benefits for Ambassadors who reach defined “tiers” of workshop-delivery activity

Interested in taking a deeper dive into the program?

Watch this GTC session

DLI Ambassador Program Qualifications

DLI Instructor-Certification Qualifications

As a DLI-certified instructor candidate, you’ll complete workshop-specific evaluations that include technical qualifications, subject matter expertise, mastery of workshop content, classroom delivery skills, and training on effective use of the DLI platform.

To qualify for membership in the Ambassador Program, you should be currently affiliated with an academic institution. You’ll also need to satisfy general technical qualifications for the technology covered in the workshop, such as deep learning, accelerated computing, and data science.

Each current DLI course has specific qualification criteria, and the courses are regularly updated.

View DLI Course Catalog

Start Your DLI Certification Process Today

STEP 1 Sign up for NVIDIA Developer Program.
Membership in the free NVIDIA Developer Program is required to review course-specific qualifications for instructor certification. If you’ve already signed up, you can log in and jump to step 2. If you’re not a member yet, please sign up now.
STEP 2 Review workshop-specific qualifications to identify which course(s) are right for you..
You need to be logged in to review course-specific qualifications.
STEP 3 Apply.
Follow the link below to complete the DLI Ambassador Program registration.
 
Start Application
Dr. Sina Mostafanejad is NVIDIA’s first Platinum Certified Instructor

Name: Dr. Sina Mostafanejad

Title: Lead Software Scientist

Location: The Molecular Sciences Software Institute, Virginia Tech, USA

Associated universities:  The Molecular Sciences Software Institute (MolSSI, Virginia Tech)

LinkedIn profile: Dr. Sina Mostafanejad

Dr. Sina Mostafanejad is the lead software scientist in high-performance computing (HPC) education, artificial intelligence, and machine learning at the Molecular Sciences Software Institute (MolSSI). He’s also a certified instructor for HPC and machine learning at Intel. As a research scientist, Sina has contributed to major commercial and open-source quantum chemistry software packages, such as Q-Chem and Psi4, and mentored more than ten MolSSI Software Fellows. His most recent efforts involve the development of a machine learning software infrastructure for the Simulation Environment for Atomistic and Molecular Modeling (SEAMM) project and the MolSSI Chem-AI project.
 

Why did you want to become a DLI University Ambassador?

The DLI University Ambassador Program has become a role-model in education at the intersection of academia and industry. Being a part of this exciting and concerted effort gave me a unique opportunity to serve the scientific community along with the most talented and intelligent team of scientists and engineers.

What impact do the workshops have on your students?

The DLI workshop and cloud resources provide an excellent framework for concise and topic-oriented training which allow students, post-doctoral researchers, faculty, and industrial engineers to learn the skill sets they need in a convenient and time-efficient way. Testimonials from our NVIDIA DLI workshops continue to be extremely positive. Our students believe the workshop certificates have significantly helped them in their daily research and professional career development.

What impact does participation in the University Ambassador Program have on your professional career?  


The DLI University Ambassador Program not only gave me a platform to connect with other national and international instructors but also provided an opportunity for our MolSSI Education Program to collaborate with NVIDIA experts to write some of our research grant proposals for professional academic training. During our partnership with DLI, we delivered the workshops in multiple national scientific venues across the US including the Fundamentals of Deep Learning workshop at the American Chemical Society in Fall 2022 in Chicago and the upcoming ACS national meeting in Spring 2023 in Indianapolis. Being engaged in routine and active technical discussion with the brightest minds and most enthusiastic researchers across this nation has helped me keep my skills sharp, and I remain excited about every opportunity that comes next in this journey.

Is there any other aspect of the DLI you would like to share?

The DLI Teaching Kits Program also provides a comprehensive set of teaching materials alongside self-paced courses and the instructor-led workshops. The hands-on training materials, designed by experts, and cloud computing resources have enriched our MolSSI-led community workshops and made our Industrial Training Program a seamless experience. DLI allows instructors to focus on training the next generation of researchers and scientists and prepare them for tackling cutting-edge and challenging problems in science and engineering instead of getting bogged down on the technicalities of preparing the training resources.

 

Peng Jia is one of our most active university ambassadors in China.

Name: Peng Jia

Title: Associate Professor. College of Physics and Optoelectronics

Location: Taiyuan University of Technology, China

Associated universities: Taiyuan University of Technology

LinkedIn profile: Peng Jia

Peng Jia is an associate professor in the College of Physics and Optoelectronics, Taiyuan University of Technology since 2018. His main interests are Smart Astronomical Instruments and Data Processing Methods, which include digital twins of optical telescopes, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and citizen science. He has published over 70 academic papers and has over10 patents in digital twin of optics systems and data processing methods. He has received several awards including the Science and Technology Progress Award of Shanxi Province (second prize), the Talent of Shanxi Province and the Excellence of Young Astronomer in the Information working committee, Chinese Astronomical Society.
 

How did you learn about The Deep Learning Institute (DLI)?  

I was first introduced to NVIDIA in 2016 through the NVIDIA CUDA Research Centre Program (https://www.dur.ac.uk/arc/nvidiacuda/), when I was studying simulation of optics system at Durham University. In 2018, I returned to the Department of Instrumentation, Taiyuan University of Technology, China and carried out independent research and teaching in digital twin of optic systems and machine learning algorithms. However, I found it difficult to find reliable and enough computing resources to support my work. I then learned about educator resources available from DLI and applied to become a University Ambassador, teaching deep learning and computer vision. Using the resources and material provided by DLI, I have trained over 600 students.

How does DLI enhance your other work?

In 2022, a new Intelligent Sensing Engineering degree was founded, and several lessons are designed based on the teaching kits and DLI workshops. Currently, my group is developing citizen science projects and teaching material for astronomy data processing methods with machine learning algorithms using the resources provided by DLI.  The teaching resources are designed with industry background and at an academic level, which provides me with insights to better design frameworks for different applications, such as data processing pipelines for data obtained by different telescopes.

Manual Martinez is one of our most experienced certified instructors.

Name: Manuel Ujaldon Martinez

Title: Full Professor en Universidad de Málaga

Location: Universidad de Malaga, Spain

Associated universities: University of Malaga

LinkedIn profile: Manuel Ujaldon Martinez

Manuel Ujaldon is full professor of computer architecture at the University of Malaga (Spain). His main research interests are high-performance and low-power GPGPU computing for image processing, biomedical applications and evolutionary computation. Prof. Ujaldon was a predoctoral and postdoctoral researcher at the Computer Science Dept. of the University of Maryland, visiting researcher at Biomedical Informatics Dept. of the Ohio State University (USA, 2003-08) and conjoint senior lecturer at the University of Newcastle (Australia, 2012-15).

He has published 8 books on computer architecture and around 100 papers in international peer-reviewed journals and conferences. Manuel was awarded CUDA Fellow by Nvidia in 2012, having taught since then more than 150 activities related to GPU computing in 23 countries, including more than 70 invited talks and tutorials in ACM/IEEE conferences.

How did you first hear about the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute (DLI)?  

As part of the CUDA Fellow group selected by NVIDIA in 2012, I was already engaged as an NVIDIA instructor for several years before DLI was created.

How does DLI contribute to your career in academia?

I find the role of DLI Ambassador to be very rewarding. I have been invited to teach in prominent universities and talk at prestigious conferences around the world which has enabled me to engage with excellent students and colleagues of all backgrounds. For a cosmopolitan and enthusiastic instructor like me, it exposes me to diverse cultures and communities, permitting me to discover fascinating countries and expand my teaching skills in many ways. Every DLI workshop that I organize is different, challenging and refreshing my professional career. This is a job that is hard to get tired of!    

Tell us about the DLI workshops you have delivered outside of Spain.

I have had many opportunities to teach abroad as an ambassador, mainly because of my reputation as an experienced NVIDIA instructor. Since 2012, I’ve taught over 100 CUDA workshops and tutorials in   ACM/IEEE conferences worldwide. Colleagues continue to invite me to participate in these activities since accelerated computing has become such a hot topic in the world of HPC. With DLI, we have much better infrastructure to run tutorials and labs, which make the workshops much more effective for our students. The University of Malaga has a long tradition of having a proactive student exchange program. Some of these programs include exchanging teaching experiences. From this, I have been very fortunate to be able to visit prominent universities in Africa and one in Asia over the last couple of years:

  • Namibia University of Science and Technology (Namibia - October, 2021).
  • Durban University of Technology (South Africa - July, 2022).
  • University of Cape Town (#1 University in Africa - August, 2022).
  • University of Kathmandu (Nepal - November, 2021).

In all these experiences, I’ve found students to be fascinated by the topics, receptive to the training and excited to receive NVIDIA Certificates of competency by an internationally experienced instructor. Overall, people were very grateful with my efforts and the hospitality was outstanding during my travels, enabling me to accumulate personal experiences like no other journey has done.

Is there anything else you would like to share about your experience with DLI?

I would like to emphasize the utility of teaching kits as a time-saving tool for preparing classes, optimizing the teaching effort and maximizing engagement from students, who look at Nvidia as the reliable source for preparing them to face the challenge of being hired in high-tech companies. Cloud services in AWS are also a fantastic resource for student to execute their first codes right away, without suffering from installing hardware and setting up software, drivers, middleware, libraries, etc. 

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