NSF names new graduate fellows

On Friday, June 13, Lillian Tran woke to an email from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) saying she’d been awarded fellowship funding. Her first thought was that it might be a scam. “I was like, ‘This cannot be true,’ ” she says. Over 2 months ago, Tran, a second-year PhD student in environmental toxicology at the University of California, Riverside, had been told she was getting an honorable mention, which does not come with funding.But the offer was real. Last week, 504 applicants were suddenly pulled from the GRFP honorable mention list and offered fully-funded fellowships. This development brings the total number of awards this year to 1,500. That’s a significant increase from the 1,000 award offers that the agency put out in April but still down from the usual funding rate of around 2,000 fellowships per year.2,000 fellowships per year.When the initial round of awards went out on April 8, NSF spokesperson Michelle Negron indicated via email to C&EN that an “announcement of additional awardees is possible subject to future resourcing considerations.” It seems the agency has now come up with the resources to support 500 more students.In a typical year, a small number of honorable mentions will be upgraded to replace individuals who were offered a fellowship but declined, says Gisèle Muller-Parker, who directed the GRFP from 2008 to 2018. But “a 50% increase in awardees in mid-June is unprecedented.”“I gasped. I cried. I immediately called and texted everyone I knew,” says Leila