Monash PhD student first in Australia to win IBM Fellowship in five years for transparent AI research
Terry Yue Zhuo, a PhD student from Monash University’s Faculty of Information Technology, has received the prestigious International Business Machines (IBM) PhD Fellowship Award – the first Australian recipient in five years.
The Fellowship recognises his innovative research in computer-level code intelligence, where he explores new techniques to enhance function calling, improve code generation accuracy and advance agentic workflows – systems that enable AI to autonomously plan and execute coding tasks.
His work pushes the boundaries of AI-assisted programming by making automated code generation more reliable, interpretable and adaptable to real-world development needs.
Established in 1951, the IBM PhD Fellowship supports outstanding graduate students whose research aligns with IBM’s strategic priorities, including quantum computing, security and trustworthy AI.
As an IBM PhD Fellow, Terry will contribute to research on Foundation Models (FMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically working on Granite, IBM’s third-generation AI language model. His focus will be on improving Granite’s security, precision and efficiency in code generation.
Granite rivals Meta’s Llama in key academic benchmarks and outperforms it in enterprise applications, particularly in safety and industry-specific tasks. While Llama is widely used as an open-source foundation model, Granite has been optimised for real-world deployment in finance, healthcare and energy, setting it apart in enterprise-grade AI solutions.
As part of the Fellowship, Terry will receive a USD 20,000 stipend and mentorship from Atin Sood, IBM’s Research Manager for AI for Code.
A second-year PhD student from Monash University’s Faculty of IT, Terry currently works in the Department of Software Systems and Cybersecurity and is supervised by Dr Xiaoning Du.
His award is rooted in his contributions to community-focused AI projects, particularly his role in building the StarCoder and StarCoder 2 LLMs as part of the BigCode initiative – an open-source effort to develop AI-powered code generation tools.
These models stand out for their efficiency, transparency and ability to generate high-quality code from natural language prompts, supporting a growing demand for explainable AI.
‘Open and transparent AI models are crucial to ensuring accountability and addressing harmful content. Terry’s work demonstrates his dedication to creating impactful, community-focused solutions,’ said Dr Du.
Beyond his IBM Fellowship, Terry recently achieved another milestone with the acceptance of his paper BigCodeBench into the prestigious International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025. Leading a global team of over 30 researchers from BigCode, he developed a benchmark to evaluate the coding capabilities of LLMs – already being adopted by Meta AI, Cohere AI, DeepSeek and Alibaba Qwen.
In addition, his latest work on the open evaluation platform for AI coding, SWE Arena, has been backed up by various companies like E2B, Hyperbolic and Hugging Face. SWE Arena aims to challenge the well-known Chatbot Arena by incorporating real-time code execution, providing a way to accurately access code quality.
Terry’s academic journey began at Monash, where he earned a Bachelor of Computer Science (Honours) in 2022. He was awarded the Monash International Merit Scholarship, receiving $10,000 annually for his achievements, and earned the DUX Award for top academic performance.
IBM is one of the world’s most influential technology companies, pioneering technological advancements for more than a century. It stands at the forefront of innovation in AI, cloud computing and enterprise-grade solutions, addressing challenges across various industries and governments.
‘Terry’s award illustrates the importance of partnering with a world-leading company like IBM, which values research and collaboration to tackle real-world challenges using cutting-edge technology. It is a testament to Terry’s talent and highlights Monash’s leadership in AI research and the Faculty’s mission to advance IT for social good,’ said Professor Jesper Kjeldskov, Deputy Dean (Research) of the Faculty of IT.