Caltech Students and Alumni Receive 2018 NSF Graduate Research Fellowships

This year, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected 27 current Caltech students and 11 recent undergraduate alumni to receive its Graduate Research Fellowships. The awards support three years of graduate study within a five-year fellowship period in research-based master's or doctoral programs in science or engineering.

The NSF notes that the Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) "is a critical program in NSF's overall strategy to develop the globally-engaged workforce necessary to ensure the nation's leadership in advancing science and engineering research and innovation." The selection criteria used to identify NSF fellows reflect the potential of the applicant to advance knowledge and benefit society.

Caltech's awardees for 2018 are seniors Yeyuan Xin, Kelly Woo, Gabrielle Tender, Kevin Shu, Suraj Nair, Anita Kulkarni, Roohi Dalal, Sarah Cai, Ashwin Balakrishna, Beatriz Atsavapranee, and Naveen Arunachalam; and graduate students Andrew Halleran, Kathryn Hamann, Alexandra Barth, Molly McFadden, Alexander Dalzell, Matthew O'Rourke, Benjamin Stevens, Patricia Nance, Meaghan Bruening, James Ousey, Riley Murray, Jason Yu, Lucy Chong, Gregory Jones, Dylan Freas, and Samuel Savitz.

Caltech alumni in the 2018 class of Graduate Fellows are: Jacob Shenker (BS '15), Joseph Berleant (BS '16), Lisa Beckmann (BS '16), Cassidy Yang (BS '16), Albert Gural (BS '16), Kerry Betz (BS '15), Andrew Romine (BS '16), Aashrita Mangu (BS '16), Siyuan Stella Wang (BS '16), Amarise Little (BS '16), and Connor Tinghan Lee (BS '17).

In total this year, the NSF selected 2,000 GRFP recipients from a pool of more than 12,000 applicants. Caltech's Fellowships Advising and Study Abroad office works with current students and recent Caltech graduates interested in applying for an NSF fellowship, sponsoring several panel discussions and workshops with previous winners each year and offering one-on-one advising.