Thirty-six University of Illinois students have won National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships. Of the 36 awardees, 31 are graduate students, and five are undergraduates. An additional 51 students were accorded honorable mention.
Launched in 1952, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF) program is the nation’s oldest and largest fellowship program for graduate students. It is also one of the most prestigious. Previous recipients include Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google), Steven Chu (former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy), Ben Bernanke (former Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve), and 42 Nobel Laureates.
The NSF-GRF supports students pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and social science fields. Applications are evaluated according to NSF’s two review criteria: intellectual merit and broader impacts. Awardees generally are those who demonstrate exemplary promise as researchers as well as show a record of using their research and related skills to benefit society. Approximately 17,000 students applied this year, and 2,000 were offered awards.
Fellowships provide three years of support and come with a $34,000 annual stipend along with coverage of tuition and fees. Awardees also have access to international research opportunities, supercomputing resources, and internships with federal agencies.
According to Wojtek Chodzko-Zajko, dean of the Graduate College, “Our students’ success with the Graduate Research Fellowships this year highlights the stellar quality of our graduate programs as well as our ability to recruit and train some of the nation’s most promising young scholars. Each of our awardees and honorable mention designees deserve congratulations for the years of hard work that factored into this outstanding accomplishment.”
“Thirty-six awardees places us tenth nationally among all institutions of higher education, and fourth among public universities,” says Ken Vickery, director of the Graduate College’s Office of External Fellowships. “This level of success is significant given that each year sees a higher number of students competing for the same number of awards. We’ve seen the number of applications increase by 5,000 just in the past five years. Though winning is becoming increasing difficult, Illinois students continue to do extremely well.”
Several resources on campus support students’ success with the GRF. The Graduate College’s Office of External Fellowships in particular targets the GRF with a portfolio of services. The office hosts a large GRF workshop each September, provides on-line proposal-writing resources, makes available sample applications, and offers individualized reviews of students’ drafts. The office also offers proposal writing workshops throughout the year and works with individual departments to help them devise their own fellowship advising resources.
Over the past few years several departments have established their own in-house precompetition review panels that offer feedback on students’ drafts. Lance Cooper, director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Physics, says, “Since Celia Elliot and I started our NSF-GRF precompetition in 2011, the number of awards and honorable mentions in Physics has significantly increased. But we think that the proposal-writing instruction and feedback offered as part of the precompetition is equally important as a means of improving the technical and proposal writing skills of all the participants."
The Department of Chemistry this year launched a semester-long grant writing course that focuses primarily on the GRF – the first course of its kind on campus. Of the 24 students who completed the course, five won the fellowship and another five received honorable mention. Prof. So Hirata, creator of the course, said, “The course served as a mechanism to compel the students to prepare applications on time, heed advice from Graduate College and past winners, ask letter writers for support, and critically review one another’s applications. The materials they prepared were entirely their work, most of which I found inspiring and humbling. So, I am not surprised by such a large proportion of the students winning the fellowships or receiving honorable mention."
Vickery adds, “The success that Chemistry, Physics, and other departments have had suggests that a coordinated, team-based approach – with hands-on support by advisors playing the central role – is critical in helping students win the NSF-GRF and other major fellowships. It requires much work by several parties, but the payoff makes it all worthwhile given that a fellowship of this caliber can offer tremendous benefits to awardees.”
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Listed below are the students from the U. of I. who were offered awards and accorded honorable mention. A complete list of winners nationwide is available on the NSF-GRFP website (to see U. of I. recipients, click the “Current Institution” column, then advance to pages 37-40).
Awardees:
Chelsea Diane Anorma (Chemistry)
Connor Scott Bailey (Materials Science and Engineering)*
Melody Buyukozer Dawkins (Psychology)
Leon Matthew Dean (Materials Science and Engineering)
Alonso Favela (Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology)
Nicole Fernandez (Geology)
Thomas Peter Foulkes (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
Cecilia Marie Gentle (Chemistry)
Stephen Thomas Gill (Physics)
Edward W. Huang (Computer Science)
Sarah Ellen Johnson (Linguistics)
Summer Donn Laffoon (Chemistry)
Yujeong Lee (Chemistry)*
Hannah Arlene Lohman (Civil and Environmental Engineering)
Kimberly Lundberg (Chemistry)
Kristina Aileen Meier (Physics)
Shannon Marie Miller (Chemistry/Integrative Biology)*
Tabitha Miller (Chemistry)
Kali Aleyse Miller (Chemistry)
Joao Guassi Moreira (Psychology)
Shannon Murray (Materials Science and Engineering)
Andrew Wade Nadolski (Astronomy)
Noel Martin Naughton (Mechanical Science and Engineering)
Elizabeth Kathleen Neumann (Chemistry)
Mai Tran Kieu Ngo (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering)
Sarah Perlmutter (Chemistry)
Christopher William Peterson (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
Hadrian Quan (Mathematics)
Aaron Roth (Chemistry)
Samantha Rubeck (Physics)
Patrick Slade (Mechanical Science and Engineering)*
Noah Trebesch (Physics)
Matthew Wu Tsao (Electrical and Computer Engineering)*
Pranjal Vachaspati (Computer Science)
Helen Catherine Wauck (Computer Science)
Doris Xin (Computer Science)
Honorable Mention:
Celeste Alexander (Nutritional Sciences)
Siraj Z. Ali (Chemistry)
Maxwell Jones Baymiller (Molecular and Cellular Biology)
Andrew Fincham Bell (Mechanical Science and Engineering)*
Adam Birchfield (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
Elena Montoto Blanco (Chemistry)
Claire T. Branigan (Anthropology)
Daniel Thomas Bregante (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering)
Marjorie Michelle Bridgewater (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering)
Megan Brooks (Materials Science and Engineering)
Haley Elizabeth Cabaniss (Geology)
Joseph Corbett Chapman (Physics)*
Nuole Chen (Political Science)
Sang Hyun Choi (Physics)
Jia Chong (Psychology)
Rajeev Shankar Chorghade (Chemistry)
Jahan Claes (Physics)
Nicole Ashley Cox (Anthropology)
Tanner Culpitt (Chemistry)
Evan Michael Curtin (Chemistry)
Katelyn Dahlke (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering)
Megan M. Davis (Psychology)
Ross Stecker DeAngelis (Integrative Biology)
Jennifer L. DeBellis (Civil and Environmental Engineering)*
Sudharsan Dwaraknath (Chemistry)
Joseph Franklin Ellis (Chemistry)
Mary Elizabeth Foltz (Civil and Environmental Engineering)
Joseph Emilio Gaudio (Mechanical Science and Engineering)*
Colin Gregory Graber (Computer Science)
Abigail Joy Halmes (Chemistry)
Allison Ilice Hilger (Speech and Hearing Sciences)
Daniel Allen Inafuku (Physics)
Blanka Eve Janicek (Materials Science and Engineering)
Alex Nathan Kahn (Mechanical Science and Engineering)*
Elliot Alexander Kaplan (Mathematics)
Davneet Kaur (Physics)
Malia Laurel Kawamura (Mechanical Science and Engineering)
Jamy Lee (Chemistry)
Carolyn Levinn (Chemistry)
Yik Tung Tracy Ling (Mechanical Science and Engineering)*
Beatriz Esmeralda Maldonado (Anthropology)
Janice Ng (Psychology)*
Huy Nguyen (Chemistry)
Tolulope Perrin-Stowe (Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology)
Christopher John Reinhardt (Chemistry)
Emma Helen Southgate (Chemistry)
Olivia Carey-De La Torre (Mechanical Science and Engineering)
Benjamin Elson Ujcich (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
Dylan Walsh (Chemistry)
Jamison Taylor Watson (Agricultural and Biological Engineering)
Weidong Ye (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
Jose Alejandro Zavala (Chemistry)
* undergraduate students