NSF halves graduate fellowship awards

The US National Science Foundation announced the winners of its prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) award earlier this month. In a typical year, the NSF awards around 2,000 students a fellowship, which provides 3 years’ worth of financial support for their doctoral or master’s studies. But this April, the NSF granted only 1,000 awards. “I think we’re going to have a lot less people getting through their degrees,” says Morgan Carter , a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Between cuts to the GRFP and other federal grants that support graduate students being frozen or eliminated entirely, graduate students are left with a shrinking pool of opportunities to secure independent funding . According to Carter, GRFP grants “make a huge difference” to students and departments. She says that’s especially true for institutions like hers, which have only recently attained R1