Ten Stony Brook Students Awarded Prestigious NSF-GRFP Fellowships

Ten Stony Brook University students have been awarded prestigious Graduate Research Fellowships (NSF GRFP) by the National Science Foundation. Another three SBU students earned honorable mentions.

This nationally competitive award provides successful applicants in NSF-supported STEM disciplines with three years of funding for graduate school.

The ten students honored with fellowships are David Arnot, Materials Science and Chemical Engineering; Clare Beatty, Clinical Psychology; Abraham Leite, Computer Science and Cognitive Science; Edelmy Marin Bernardez, Chemistry; Riley McDanal, Clinical Psychology; Sam van der Poel, Applied Mathematics & Statistics; and Kristin Walker, Clinical Psychology. The following three Stony Brook alumni also received fellowships: Fnu Karan Kumar ’21, Applied Mathematics & Statistics and Physics; Micaela Rodriguez ’19, Psychology; and Chantelle Roulston ’20, Psychology and Sociology.

The three honorable mentions are Dylan Galt, Mathematics; Kenneth Hanson, Linguistics; and Whitney Wong ’21, Biology alum.

“Once again, our students’ success demonstrates the importance of the Graduate School’s partnership with OVPR to provide students with a first rate GRFP mentoring program,” said Eric Wertheimer, dean of the Graduate School.

“Despite the lingering pandemic, Stony Brook students really excelled again this year with the GRFP competition,” said Kathleen Flint Ehm, assistant dean for Graduate and Postdoctoral Initiatives. “The funding provided by these awards for graduate school will allow our students the freedom to focus fully on their PhD research and advancing their careers.”

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-supported STEM disciplines.

Click below to view a gallery with more about the fellowship winners.

David Arnot
Hometown: Albuquerque, New Mexico
Major: Materials Science and Chemical Engineering
Research Advisors: Esther Takeuchi, Kenneth Takeuchi, Amy Marschilok

Arnot’s research focuses on developing next-generation battery technologies, which will be essential for the transition to renewable energy in the coming years. Many renewable energy sources are inherently intermittent and therefore require storage systems to maintain stable power delivery. A large-scale, low-cost and efficient solution to this problem will be essential in the fight against climate change.

Arnot is also on a Graduate Council Fellowship at Stony Brook University.

Clare Beatty

Hometown: Darien, Connecticut
Major: Clinical Psychology
Research Advisor: Brady Nelson

Uncertainty is an inevitable part of life (from small things, like the weather, to big things, like a global pandemic!). However, some people are more sensitive to uncertainty than others. Beatty’s research explores how people think about and anticipate the future, particularly when it is uncertain and unpredictable. Her program of research uses affective neuroscience to better identify individuals who are at increased risk for psychopathology because of an increased sensitivity to unpredictability.

Abe Leite

Hometown: Bloomington, Indiana
Majors: Computer Science and Cognitive Science
Research Advisor: Gregory Zelinsky

Leite’s research fundamentally deals with how neural systems encode information and how they process information over time to perform adaptive behaviors. He believes that deciding to take actions, without being compelled by stimuli from the environment, is key to what makes us alive, and he uses simple computational models to study this ability on a theoretical level. In his funded project, he applies this general approach to the particular question of object-based visual attention, collaborating with a SUNY optometry lab studying the neurophysiology of primate vision to understand and model the neural processes that underlie the decision to look at one object rather than another.

Leite earned a Fleischer Research Scholarship at Indiana University and a Graduate Council Fellowship at Stony Brook University.

Edelmy Marin Bernardez

Hometown: Santa Rosa de Aguán, Colón, Honduras
Major: Chemistry
Minor: Mathematics
Research Advisors: Esther S. Takeuchi, Amy C. Marschilok, Kenneth J. Takeuchi

As society continues to progress toward the next generation of electronic devices and electric vehicles, the development of improved power sources is crucial to store and supply the energy demands according to our needs. Bernardez’s research interest focuses on the development of advanced materials for lithium-based batteries. The objective is to increase the energy storage capacity by utilizing environmentally benign materials, while simultaneously facilitating safe operation of the device in harsh conditions. This would address the current challenges and safety concerns that have risen as we continue to push the current technology to its limits, which often result in battery degradation, and even sometimes, the combustion of commercialized consumer batteries.

Bernardez was a Norman C Francis (Presidential) Scholarship recipient (2015-2019) at Xavier University of Louisiana, NASA MIRO Undergraduate Research Scholar (2017-2019), Ronald E. McNair Scholar (2017-2019), France-Belgium iREU program alumna (2019), Dr. W. Burghardt Turner Fellowship recipient (2020), and Southern Regional Education Board Fellowship recipient (2021).

Riley McDanal

Hometown: Lakeland, Florida
Major: Clinical Psychology
Research Advisors: Nicholas R. Eaton and Jessica L. Schleider

Despite its pervasiveness, mental distress is not as well understood or effectively treated as one would hope. Research on the structure of mental distress can pave the way for the creation of more accessible and potent interventions. McDanal aims to bridge the gap between fundamental conceptualizations of mental well-being and applied practices of treating emotional and behavioral difficulties. 

McDanal has also received Stony Brook University’s John Neale Endowed Graduate Student Excellence Fund.  

Sam van der Poel

Hometown: New York, New York
Majors: Applied Mathematics and Statistics
Research Advisors: Jeffrey Heinz, Joseph Mitchell, Dror Varolin

van der Poel’s research interests span machine learning, differential geometry and combinatorial optimization. By further deepening and integrating these fields, he aims to develop powerful mathematical and computational methods that are applicable to diverse research areas including artificial intelligence, drug discovery and biological network analysis.

Kristin Walker

Hometown: Portsmouth, Rhode Island
Major: Clinical Psychology
Research Advisors: Matthew Lerner (Primary, Clinical Psychology). Jenny Singleton (Secondary, Linguistics)

Walker is interested in the intersection of autism and deafness and exploring how language, audition and cognition affect social functioning and the well-being of autistic and deaf people.

She was a Fulbright Fellowship semi-finalist (2018), received the College of the Holy Cross George J. Allen Psychology Award (2018), the Meeting on Language in Autism Research Initiative Award (2019), the University of Connecticut Provost Merit Award (2020), the International Society for Autism Research Diversity Travel Award (2022), and was a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship honorable mention (2022).

 

Micaela Rodriguez ’19

Hometown: Central Islip, New York
Major: Psychology
Research Advisor: Kristin Bernard

Rodriguez’s research is centered on asking innovative questions about mechanisms by which early life stress and trauma influences neurodevelopmental trajectories of risk and resilience while advocating for equity in science and society. Her ultimate goal is to become an academic researcher and professor. Given her experience as a first-generation Latina woman, she hopes to serve as an example that science is for everyone.

Chantelle Roulston ’20
Hometown: Rockaway Beach, New York
Major: Clinical Psychology
Research Advisor: Jessica Schleider

Roulston aims to develop a generalizable theory about what motivates racial minority individuals to volunteer for research studies. Her research project involves building and evaluating theory-driven approaches to increasing racial minority individuals’ participation in psychological research. Her goal with this work is to increase representation of diverse racial groups in research studies across disciplines and, in turn, to potentially increase the validity and generalizability of research findings. 

Roulston was awarded a Dr. W. Burghardt Turner Fellowship (2022).

Dylan Galt

Major: Mathematics
Research Advisors: Simon Donaldson, Mark McLean

Galt’s past research has focused on the geometry behind algorithms in computational number theory. In particular, he is involved in a long-term project to better understand the geometry of lattices, which have important applications in cryptography and modern cybersecurity. Here at Stony Brook, his research focuses more on aspects of pure mathematics that feature strong ties to modern physics. His current work is on better understanding the geometry of moduli spaces that arise in gauge theory and symplectic topology.

Kenneth Hanson

Hometown: Novi, Michigan
Major: Linguistics
Research Advisor: Thomas Graf

Hanson’s research focuses on the mathematical properties of the grammars of human languages. An explicitly mathematical perspective makes it easier to abstract away from trivial differences and understand the kinds of patterns attested across languages, and across different components of the grammar, such as syntax (sentence structure) and phonology (sound structure). This knowledge in turn informs research on how languages can be learned and used, whether by people or machines.

Hanson received a Stony Brook University Graduate Council Fellowship (2020).

Whitney Wong ’21

Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
Major: Biology
Undergraduate Advisor: Joshua Rest
Graduate Advisor: William Ratcliff 

Wong is a post-baccalaureate in the Ratcliff lab in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech. She works with a model system called snowflake yeast to study the evolution of multicellularity. Specifically, she examines the role of oxygen-binding proteins in the utilization of oxygen as a resource during the rise of atmospheric oxygen levels in early Earth history, known as the Great Oxygenation Event. This project has the potential to contribute to the bigger picture of how larger, complex multicellular life forms came to be and the importance of oxygen as an environmental parameter in this transition, and to explain other major evolutionary events on Earth. Wong receives support from an NSF Research Experience for Post-baccalaureate Students (REPS) grant for this project.