Record-Tying 11 Stony Brook Students Win Prestigious NSF-GRFP Fellowships
In a record-tying performance, 11 Stony Brook students – including nine women – have been awarded prestigious Graduate Research Fellowships (NSF GRFP) by the National Science Foundation. Another six SBU students earned Honorable Mentions.
Students honored with fellowships include, in alphabetical order, Hindy Drillick (Mathematics), Stephanie Johnson (Anthropology and Africana Studies), Savannah LaBua (Marine Vertebrate Biology), Ann Lin (Biochemistry and Economics) and Katherine Lo (Biochemistry & Cell Biology).
Also named Fellows were Diana Lutz (Chemistry), Jessica Maghakian (Applied Mathematics and Statistics), Gabrielle Paniccia (Biochemistry), T.J. Sullivan (Clinical Psychology), Christopher Tang (Materials Science and Chemical Engineering) and Daneele Thorpe (Clinical Psychology).
“This award is crucial to promoting social mobility for our most promising STEM students and to providing them with the freedom to develop their own research agendas,” said Jen Green, External Scholarships and Fellowships Advisor. “I was humbled by the talent and hustle displayed by this cohort and am thrilled by the university community’s celebration of their accomplishments in this year’s NSF GRFP competition.”
The advising program behind SBU’s remarkable success is co-sponsored by the Graduate School and the Office of the Vice President for Research. Green also praised the efforts of colleagues at the Center for Inclusive Education, sponsors of the Turner Fellowship program that helped to nurture three of the 11 fellows, Hannah Morales Hernandez, T.J. Sullivan and Daneele Thorpe.
The NSF GRFP was established in 1952 to help develop and boost diversity of the country’s science and engineering research workforce by supporting graduate students who pursue research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in NSF-support STEM disciplines.
Green leads the NSF GRFP advising program together with David A. Rubenstein, associate professor and graduate program director in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.
“Our team helps students tell their story and pitch their research in a compelling way,” Rubenstein said. “Our goal is for them to gain recognition as the next generation of outstanding researchers and learn best practices of proposal writing.”
Rubenstein led a team of proposal experts who supplemented the efforts of the students’ departmental advisors. They included Dr. Benjamin Martin, Biochemistry; Dr. Sheri Clark, Office of the Vice President of Research, Dr. Anne McElroy, School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS) and Dr. Kathlyn Parker, Chemistry.
Rubenstein also thanked Interim Dean of the Graduate School Richard Gerrig for his “incredibly supportive” role in creating a highly successful collaborative advising model.
Stony Brook students winning Honorable Mentions were Jacob Crosser, Kenneth Davidson, James Glazar, Elizabeth Inman, Evan Lammertse and Hannah Morales Hernandez.
Click below to view a gallery with more about the Fellowship winners:
Hindy Drillick
Home town: Brooklyn, NY
Academic department: Undergraduate, Mathematics
Departmental advisors: Aleksey Zinger, Blaine Lawson
Drillick conducts research in dynamical systems, a field that studies the long-term behavior of systems that evolve with time. Dynamical systems arise in all areas of science, for example, systems of particles in statistical mechanics. She examines to what extent the particles in a system will get mixed together over time as well as how often a system will return to to a state that is similar to one of its previous states. In particular, she studies the mixing properties of circle rotations for certain infinite measures.
Stephanie Johnson
Home town: Staten Island, NY
Academic department: Undergraduate, Anthropology/ Africana Studies
Departmental advisors: Abena Asare, Pamela Block, Amy Hammock
Johnson studies the special education-to-prison pipeline, which she describes as “a complex intersection of race, class, disability, and incarceration” and an example of the use and misuse of race in medical analysis. Her research will result in the creation and dissemination of policy documents to assist educators and medical personnel in recognizing the psychological effects of social inequities such as poverty and racism and offer social support as primary intervention.
Savannah LaBua
Home town: Patterson, NY
Academic department: Recent SBU graduate, SoMAS, Marine Vertebrate Biology
Departmental advisors: Mary Stanton, Kamazima Lwiza
Currently working at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), LaBua studies Pacific herring, a critical component of the eastern Gulf of Alaska ecosystem, providing a viable food source for humpback whales, sea lions, seabirds, other fish, etc. Stocks have experienced significant declines in abundance since the development of industrial fishing. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has closed fishing for eight of the ten stocks managed in Southeast Alaska but most have failed to recover since the 1980’s. Data and knowledge gained from this study would be of great interest in marine ecology because it directly addresses questions of what factors maintain and distribute variability in marine populations and the importance of their influence.
Ann Lin ’18
Home town: Farmingdale, NY
Academic department: Recent SBU graduate, Biochemistry and Economics
Departmental advisors: Jason Sheltzer, Peter Gergen, Gabor Balazsi
As a Fulbright Scholar in Norway, Ann is currently working to combine mass spectrometry technology, organoids, and organ-on-CHIP technology to create a pipeline to measure patient response to drugs
Katherine Lo
Home town: Whitestone, NY
Academic department: Recent SBU graduate, Biochemistry & Cell Biology
Departmental advisors: Benjamin Martin
Lo uses the zebrafish tailbud to model vertebrate development and study stem cell fate decisions. She focuses on a group of bipotential stem cells known as the neuromesodermal progenitors and studies how they become part of either the nervous system or muscle. Because vertebrate development is conserved throughout evolution, understanding stem cell differentiation in zebrafish can provide insight into human development and eventually lead to therapies for birth defects.
Diana M. Lutz
Hometown: Richmond, VA
Academic department: Doctoral student, Chemistry
Departmental advisors: Esther Takeuchi, Amy Marschilok, Kenneth Takeuchi
In collaboration with her peers in the Marschilok/Takeuchi group, Lutz is studying the fundamental processes that govern battery performance. Improving our current technology will make electric vehicles a sustainable replacement for combustion engine cars and provide larger scale energy storage for intermittent sources, such as wind and solar. The team’s approach is to obtain a full understanding of these technologies through advanced characterization techniques that can show us what is happening at an atomic and molecular level. She believes this type of insight will guide society to a new, sustainable energy infrastructure.
Jessica Maghakian
Academic department: Doctoral student, Applied Mathematics and Statistics (AMS)
Departmental advisor: Zhenhua Liu
Maghakian works on optimization algorithms that are required to make decisions in real-time, with imperfect knowledge of the future. As real-time optimization becomes more widespread in application areas such as the smart grid and self-driving vehicles, reliable algorithms with theoretical performance guarantees will become a necessity.
Gabrielle Paniccia ’19
Home town: Bel Air, Maryland
Academic Department: Undergraduate, Biochemistry
Advisor: Dr. Laurie Krug
Paniccia, a graduating senior, is focused on developing a CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing system to target a mouse oncogenic virus. This research lays a foundation that may one day be applied to related, human oncogenic viruses.
Timothy (T.J.) Sullivan
Home town: Harleysville, PA
Academic department: Doctoral student, Clinical Psychology
Departmental advisors: K. Daniel O’Leary and Joanne Davila
Sullivan’s research seeks to build new knowledge about how social inequality and injustice impacts sexual minority (e.g., lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, pansexual, or non-heterosexual) romantic relationships given that sexual orientation-related stigma by nature threatens the very existence of such partnerships. In particular, Sullivan focuses on understanding how experiences of discrimination, trauma, and violence may drive partners apart or bring them together.
Christopher Tang
Home town: Phoenix, AZ
Academic Department: Doctoral student, Materials Science and Chemical Engineering
Departmental Advisors: Esther Takeuchi, Kenneth Takeuchi, Amy Marshcilok
As a part of the Takeuchi/Marschilok group, Tang researches batteries and other energy storage technologies as they pertain to electric vehicles and grid level energy storage. Along with improving battery performance, he focuses on studying systems that are lower-cost, sustainable and environmentally friendly. He believes that understanding the fundamental mechanisms of energy storage in these systems is crucial to furthering the technology and eventually implementing them into society.
Daneele Thorpe
Home town: Brooklyn, NY
Academic department: Doctoral student , Clinical Psychology
Departmental advisors: Kristin Bernard, PhD
Thorpe’s research interests include how stressful and traumatic experiences during early life influence children’s behavioral, socioemotional, and neurobiological development. She also investigates how parents and other caregivers can play a major role in protecting children from the effects of early stressful experiences.