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 status, which signifies that an institution spends at least $50 million on research and presents at least 70 research doctorates per year.

A GRFP award comes with 3 years of annual financial support consisting of both a living stipend—currently $37,000—and $16,000 for tuition. Each fellow’s graduate school administers the award, but the fellowship money moves with the student if they change programs after their first year. For talented students that don’t quite make the final cut, the NSF also gives honorable mentions, which don’t carry a monetary award but are still an impressive addition to a student’s résumé. Students can apply to the GRFP up to two times—once as a senior undergraduate and once as a first- or second-year grad student.

Moriah Weese-Myers, a 2021 GRFP awardee who recently defended her PhD in chemistry at the University of Cincinnati, says she probably could not have completed her PhD if she hadn’t gotten a fellowship. She has a chronic illness, and there were times that they could not be in the lab consistently (Weese-Myers uses both she and they pronouns). “It would have been very hard for my adviser to support me on [National Institutes of Health] funds,” they say. The GRFP money allowed her to have a more flexible work arrangement that enabled them to finish their degree, she says.

With the cost of living rising faster than graduate stipends can keep up with, a GRFP fellowship can be especially useful for students who don’t have generational wealth or can’t rely on their parents to financially support them. That issue disproportionately affects queer, Black, Hispanic, and other marginalized people, Weese-Myers adds. Cutting funding means “your whole scientific community is losing out on people who would be excellent members of it, because you're not investing in them.”

Nozomi Ando, a chemistry professor at Cornell University and director of graduate studies for the department, is relieved that there are still GRFP awards going out, but the cuts are “deeply concerning,” she tells C&EN by text message.

“Any successful enterprise—academic or industrial—needs a pipeline for growth, succession, and investments in a diverse portfolio,” Ando says. Damaging that pathway, as the GRFP cuts have done, creates “significant risks” for the future of US science, she says.

“Graduate students are some of the most driven and hardworking people I know,” Ando says. “Undermining them not only hurts their careers—it means fewer people working to solve problems and drive innovation,” which hurts everyone, she adds.

According to C&EN’s analysis of GRFP awardee data, between 2014 and 2024, the NSF awarded an average of about 2,020 students a GRFP grant and named about 2,050 honorable mentions—essentially a 50-50 split. This year, the proportion slid to 25% awards and 75% honorable mentions.

The combined number of awards and honorable mentions did jump slightly in 2025 from last year. The NSF recognized a total of over 4,000 students this year, up from around 3,700 in 2024. But the shift in proportion of awards to honorable mentions suggests that the NSF essentially moved the grant cutoff up.

The NSF declined to answer specific questions about how it decided on the final list of awardees. But agency spokesperson Michelle Negron tells C&EN via email that the NSF is committed to maintaining the stipend and tuition benefits for new and existing fellows, and an “announcement of additional awardees is possible subject to future resourcing considerations.”

Only students in specific fields are eligible to apply to the GRFP, including chemistry, physics, life sciences, and materials research. This year’s grant cuts hit every eligible field. C&EN’s analysis found that chemistry awards dropped 56% from 2024. Physics and astronomy, geosciences, and life sciences all saw similar cuts. A few fields made out a bit better than others—awards in engineering dropped by about 45%, for example, while materials research experienced the smallest drop, at 36%.

C&EN also analyzed GRFP data by specific subfields of chemistry. The data showed that students in all areas of chemistry were about equally represented as awardees and honorable mentions between 2014 and 2025.

Bill Wuest, a chemistry professor at Emory University, saw this year’s shift to fewer awards and more honorable mentions firsthand. He says students in Emory’s Department of Chemistry normally get three to six GRFP awards in a given year. This year, they got six honorable mentions and no awards. Only two people at the entire university got awards—both of them undergraduates. It's “quite a big difference from years past,” Wuest says.

Federal funding for the sciences has a huge return on investment, Wuest says, and that’s not even accounting for the longer-term benefits of training talented students for success in their future careers. The amount of investment the GRFP represents is also a relatively small part of the NSF’s budget: the 2025 budget request for the program was just over $341 million, 3.3% of the overall agency request of $10.2 billion.

But there is a chance that the NSF will distribute more grants this year. According to a senior undergraduate who received an honorable mention this year, the agency told honorably mentioned students in an email that “a subsequent announcement of additional awardees is possible, subject to finalization of the agency's fiscal year 2025 spend plan.”