Grad Students Earn Prestigious NSF Fellowships

UC Merced graduate students Theo Crouch II and Lauren Edwards recently were awarded fellowships from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP).

Jessica Ross was recognized as an honorable mention by the GRFP, while Patricia Cabral received an honorable mention from the National Academies of Science and Engineering’s Ford Predoctoral Fellowship Program. The news comes on the heels of cognitive science student David Vinson’s selection for an intensely competitive $30,000 IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Award.

The NSF GRFP honors and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees. 

Crouch and Edwards — both members of Professor Fabian Filipp’s Systems Biology and Cancer Metabolism group — will each receive $34,000 per year for three years, while the university receives $12,000 in institutional support for each of the three years. This year, there were 16,500 applicants to the program — 2,000 fellowships were awarded, and 2,004 honorable mentions were acknowledged.

While honorable mentions do not receive any funding from the foundations, the UC Merced Graduate Division has awarded Ross and Cabral Graduate Dean’s Fellowships in the amount of $5,000 each in acknowledgment of their achievements. Ross is a second-year student who works with Professor Ramesh Balasubramaniam in the Cognitive and Information Sciences program. Cabral is a psychology student working with Professor Jan Wallander.