Huskies Earn Record Numbers of NSF Graduate Research Fellowships

Established in 1952, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF-GRFP) was created to support aspiring scientists and engineers pursuing graduate degrees and cutting-edge research in STEM fields. Each year, more than 12,000 graduate and undergraduate students apply for the NSF-GRFP. The benefits of the award include generous financial support and participation in a network of distinguished alumni, more than 440 of whom are members of the National Academy of Sciences. This year, a record-breaking 23 Huskies were selected for this fellowship; another ten earned honorable mentions. Congratulations to all of our undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni who earned fellowships and honorable mentions!

Adel Wael Attari COE’19, Chemical Engineering
Adel Attari graduated from Northeastern in 2019, having completed research through the CanCure Program at the Center for Systems Biology at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Attari also researched the delivery of gene therapies at Professor Mansoor Amiji’s Laboratory of Biomaterials and Advanced Nano-Delivery Systems.

Gillian Nyala Audia COE’23, Chemical Engineering and Biochemistry
Mentor(s): Adam Ekenseair, Vaso Lykourinou, Jeffrey Karp, Yuhan Lee, Lauren Wolf
Gillian Nyala Audia will complete her undergraduate studies cum laude with a B.S. in chemical engineering and biochemistry and a minor in mathematics at Northeastern University in 2023. Passionate about biomaterials, biofabrication, and translational research, she is interested in accelerating the development and clinical application of bioprinting technologies for tissue and organ regeneration, with a focus on cardiac regeneration. She has been named a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and is an incoming Ph.D. student in bioengineering at Rice University.
*PEAK Awardee

Rebecca R. Chinn COE’18, Chemical Engineering
Rebecca Chinn graduated summa cum laude from Northeastern in 2018. Chinn is currently pursuing a PhD in bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego.

Derek R. Egolf Khoury PhD‘25, Computer Science
Mentor(s): Stavros Tripakis and Pete Manolios
Derek Egolf is a doctoral student at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, advised by Stavros Tripakis and Pete Manolios. His doctoral research, which he began in 2021 and expects to complete in 2026, focuses on formal methods. Recognizing that automatic synthesis of correct-by construction programs often produces inefficient, unusable programs, Egolf is interested in synthesis algorithms that can produce correct and efficient systems. He is intrigued by approximate notions of correctness, which may make some of the problems more tractable. Egolf has published multiple papers on formal methods with colleagues at Tufts University—one of which he presented at LangSec 2021—and is a member of Khoury College’s Formal Methods Group.

Michaela Marie Fanikos COS’21 PhD’25, Behavioral Neuroscience
Mentor(s): Heather Brenhouse
Michaela Fanikos completed her undergraduate studies summa cum laude with a B.S. in behavioral neuroscience and a minor in economics at Northeastern University in 2021. She is currently a second-year PhD candidate in the behavioral neuroscience area within the psychology department at Northeastern University. Working under her mentor, Dr. Heather Brenhouse, Michaela studies the impact of early life adversity on the developing brain. She has a particular interest in how microglia, the resident immune cell of the brain, are altered by stress early in life and how these changes may alter neural function throughout the lifespan. Her proposal about microglial priming via glucocorticoid signaling was awarded the NSF-GRFP.

Seth A. Freedman COS’21, Chemistry
Mentor(s): George O’Doherty
Seth Freedman graduated from Northeastern in 2021. Freedman is currently pursuing a PhD in chemistry, with a focus on organic chemistry, especially natural product total synthesis, at the University of Chicago.

Caroline Ghio COE’21, Chemical Engineering
Mentors: Abigail Koppes, Charles Fulco, and Reza Kalhor
A Northeastern graduate and now second-year PhD student in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, Caroline is developing and applying new computational and molecular engineering tools to record gene expression during development and disease progression. Developing these technologies will allow us to establish novel treatments for cancer, developmental disorders, and neurodegenerative diseases.
*PEAK Awardee

Ashley Herrick COE PhD ’25, Bioengineering
Mentor(s): Chiara Bellini, Rouzbeh Amini
Ashley Herrick is a PhD student in her second year of study in the Bioengineering department, working with Dr. Chiara Bellini. Her current research initiatives are centered upon cardiovascular biomechanics of murine arteries, specifically focusing on the effects of smoke exposure. Prior to Northeastern, Ashley obtained her Bachelor of Science degree in Biomedical Engineering at UMass Amherst where she conducted comprehensive research on post-traumatic osteoarthritis, focusing on a rabbit knee model. Ashley has been recognized by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, which was awarded to her based on her pioneering research proposal titled, “Hysterectomy and the Contribution of Hormones, Aging, and Smoking on the Structural and Functional Remodeling of the Cardiovascular System in the Female Mouse”. Related to her academic achievements, Ashley has developed a vested interest in improving health outcomes for women, which was catalyzed by her own experiences within the U.S. healthcare system.

Nicholas Kathios COS PhD’25, Psychology
Mentor(s): Psyche Loui, Laurel Gabard-Durnam, and uliet Davidow
Nicholas is currently a second-year PhD student in the Psychology department, working in the Music, Imaging, and Neural Dynamics (MIND) Laboratory under Dr. Psyche Loui in the Center for Cognitive and Brain Health. He studies both why we like to listen to music and why we have memories associated with music. With the GRFP award, he plans on investigating developmental differences in reward responses to music using both behavioral and neuroimaging methods.

Nora Khalil  COE PhD’25, Chemical Engineering
Mentor(s): Richard West
Nora is currently a second-year Chemical Engineering Ph.D. student in the computational modeling lab of Dr. Richard West. Here at Northeastern, she is working to further develop a software called RMG, which is a software that automatically generates detailed kinetic models for combustion and heterogeneous catalysis. Her work includes using RMG to study the combustion of halogenated refrigerants and PFAS.

Bjorn Kierulf COE’22, Mechanical Engineering
Mentor(s): Andrew Gouldstone, Umit Coskun, Marilyn Minus, Michael Allshouse, Drew Weibel
Bjorn Gordon Kierulf completed his undergraduate studies summa cum laude with a B.S. in mechanical engineering at Northeastern University in December of 2022. As an undergraduate, he validated aerodynamic computational fluid dynamics against in-flight measurements, then used those methods to determine structural requirements for a rocket. He is passionate about the intersection of fluid mechanics and numerical methods and will be pursuing research on numerical methods for high-energy density multiphase flows. He is an incoming Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
*PEAK Awardee

Gabrielle R. LeBlanc COS’17, Biology
Gabrielle LeBlanc is currently pursuing a PhD in microbial biology at The Scripps Research Institute.

Kelsie Lynn Lopez COS PhD’27, Developmental Psychology
Mentor(s): Laurel Gabard-Durnam
Kelsie Lopez is a first-year PhD student in the department of psychology at Northeastern University. She conducts her research in the Plasticity in Neurodevelopment Lab under the direction of Dr. Laurel Gabard-Durnam in the Center for Cognitive and Brain Health. She studies the effects of early adverse life events on language-sensitive period timing at the levels of behavior and electroencephalography (EEG) brain activity in infancy and childhood. In addition, she investigates how music can be used as a regulatory tool in the context of stressful life events. Kelsie would like to thank her incredible mentor and lab mates for their continued support through the application process and beyond!

David Makoto McMullin COE’20, Chemical Engineering
Mentor(s): David Schaffer, Hunter Johnson, Andrew Grube, Praveen Kola, Gavin Barnard, Courtney Pfluger
David’s work is currently focused on developing thermoresponsive polymers as a scaffold to scale up the production of differentiated pluripotent stem cells for cell therapy. In his graduate research, he plans on developing technologies in the cell and gene therapy space to tackle neurodegenerative diseases. After graduating in 2020, David has spent three years in industry working at Genentech and now at Axent Biosciences focusing on Process Development. In fall 2023, he will be joining the UCSF/UC Berkeley joint PhD program in Bioengineering.

B. Parazin COS’23, Physics and Mathematics
Mentor(s): Sam Munoz, Michael Coughlin
B. Parazin will complete their undergraduate studies summa cum laude with a B.S. in physics and a B.S. in mathematics at Northeastern University in 2023. They have a passion for performing research with mathematical and computational methods, and for the planet we live on. They have performed a range of studies inspired by this love, from simulating weather patterns over the Mississippi River Basin to optimizing telescope schedules. In 2022, they were a recipient of a Barry Goldwater Scholarship, and in 2023 they were named as a recipient of an NSF graduate research fellowship. After graduation, they will turn their energies to simulating coupled ice sheet-sea level interactions as an incoming PhD student in Earth and planetary sciences at McGill.
*Goldwater Scholar and PEAK Awardee

Liam Pavlovic Khoury’22 PhD’27, Computer Science
Mentor(s): Lawson Wong,  David Rosen, Alexandra Pacureanu, and Nicola Viganò
Liam is currently in the first year of his PhD in computer science at Northeastern. During his PhD, Liam plans to develop machine learning algorithms for computer vision problems with more expressive and accurate models of uncertainty. By helping agents know what they do not know, he hopes to enable them to introspectively reason about their own knowledge and safely explore with minimal human guidance.

Andrew James Piasecki  COS PhD’25, Biology
Mentor(s): Dori Woods, Jon Tilly
Andrew’s work centers around the role of mitochondria in stem cell fate specification and differentiation. Specifically, he will look to chart mitochondrial progression throughout the differentiation process and address whether these organelles play an active role in driving cell fate decisions. He is a second-year graduate student here at Northeastern in Dori Woods’ lab, operating with the Tilly lab as a shared space known as the LAIR (Laboratory for Aging and Infertility Research).

Michael Shen COE’23, Computer Engineering
Mentor(s): David Kaeli, Yifan Sun, Amir Kavyan Ziabari,
Michael Shen’s research focuses on exploring how we can make the design of next-generation hardware more secure, to mitigate the impacts of vulnerabilities that currently exist, without adversely impacting performance. Michael will be heading to Cornell University, where he intends to earn the PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
*PEAK Awardee

Alyssa Smith  CSSH PhD’25, Network Science
Mentor(s):  Brooke Foucault Welles, David Lazer, Jonathan Green, TL Taylor, and Nathan Matias
Alyssa is a current second-year PhD student at the Network Science Institute studying networks on social media; specifically, she is trying to understand the ways that amplification can broker attention and change the structure of networks on Twitter. In the future, she plans to study how ideas are brokered in media and look at the formation of unlikely ties on Reddit (and possibly Twitter). She is also interested in the roles that algorithmic curation and user choice play in content exposure and network formation.

Amanda Stark COS’22, Behavioral Neuroscience
Mentor(s): Christopher Chen, Wade Regehr, Don O’Malley, Taekyung Kwon, Rebecca Shansky
Next year, Amanda will be pursing a PhD in neuroscience with the goal of eventually serving as the principal investigator of her lab, focusing on the study of synapses and circuits. She will be enrolling in the University of California San Francisco’s neuroscience graduate program.

*PEAK Awardee

Jonathan L. Tan COE’23, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Mentor(s): Nian Sun, Troy Olsson, Brian Smith, and Bryan McLaughlin
Jonathan Tan is a fourth-year electrical engineering student who will graduate with a B.S. from Northeastern University in 2023. He developed his research interests, including microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and magnetic devices, in Professor Nian Sun’s Advanced Materials and Microsystems Laboratory at Northeastern. In his future research, he will study micro-scale low-frequency magnetic field sensors for brain-machine interface and undersea magnetic anomaly applications. He has completed co-ops and internships at Micro-Leads Inc., the University of Pennsylvania, and The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc. His previous NSF-funded research experiences were 2020 TAMNS URP and 2021 SUNFEST REU fellowships. Jonathan will pursue his Ph.D. in Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

Nathan Matthieu Tang COS’23, Chemistry
Mentor(s): Roman Manestsch, Jeffery McKenna, Artiom Cernijenko, and George O’Doherty
Nathan Matthieu Tang is an incoming Ph.D. student in organic chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. He will complete his undergraduate studies summa cum laude with a B.S. in chemistry and a minor in philosophy at Northeastern University in 2023. Passionate about research at the intersection between organic synthesis and drug discovery, he is interested in developing heterodox synthetic methods, such as electrochemistry and photochemistry, to deepen understanding of unexplored reactivity and enable efficient and robust access to high-value molecules in drug discovery. He has been named a Hertz Fellowship Finalist and a US National Chemistry Olympiad Finalist. His research in the total synthesis of natural products earned funding from Bristol Myers Squibb and was awarded an American Chemical Society Division of Organic Chemistry Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship.

Justin Vega COS’23, Physics and Philosophy
Mentor(s): Louise Skinnari, Sean Andrews, Michael Johnson, Rory Smead
Justin Vega will be completing his undergraduate studies this year with a B.S. in Physics and Philosophy, and minors in Mathematics and Music Recording. In his time at Northeastern, he has studied the subatomic at CERN and Fermilab, and explored the astronomical at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. His current research interests are in modeling and inference problems at the intersection of astrophysics and data science. He most recently used simulated telescope observations to generate polarized images and movies of supermassive black holes with the Event Horizon Telescope project. Justin was selected for the Huntington 100 and was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to support his upcoming PhD studies in Astronomy at Columbia University.

Congratulations also to the Huskies who achieved an NSF GRFP Honorable Mention this year!

Austin Baggetta Bouve’20, Pharmaceutical Sciences
Amanda Dee COE’23, Bioengineering
Lee Huang Bouve’17, Pharmaceutical Sciences
Emily King COS’19, Biology
Timea Kolozsvary COS’17, Chemistry
Stephanie Krueger COS’21, Marine Biology and Environmental Science
Rholee Xu COS’21, Biology and Mathematics
Madeline Eppley COS PhD’25, Marine and Environmental Sciences
Catherine Huang CPS MS’24, Global Studies and International Relations
Katherine Vincent COS PhD’27, Psychology