NSF names 504 new graduate research 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.

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 Filien, a second-year PhD student in chemistry at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, who is among the new fellows. “I had kind of given up hope” that the NSF would expand the awardee list, she says.

A GRFP award comes with 3 years of annual financial support consisting of a living stipend—currently $37,000—and $16,000 for tuition. Fellowship funding is tied to the student rather than a lab or project, which gives recipients a measure of academic freedom. It also means that their advisers don’t have to worry about funding them for those 3 years—a big help given recent sweeping cuts to research funding in the US.

“Now I have the security to explore all the things I love about science. But it also provides a safety net for my lab,” says Logan Blackham, a new fellowship recipient and first-year graduate student at Texas A&M University. Arkajit Mandal, Blackham’s adviser, is just starting out as an assistant professor and doesn’t have the funds to pay all his grad students as full-time research assistants. Having a GRFP award means Blackham can focus on his research in quantum chemistry instead of working part-time as a teaching assistant.

Tran says her lab recently endured a string of grant rejections, so both she and her adviser were “super relieved” to see the fellowship offer. “We were just like, ‘Oh my god, we don't need to worry about the lack of funding in our lab anymore.’ ”

Seventy-four of the new awards went to students listing chemistry as their primary field of study. The fields with the greatest number of new awards were computer science and engineering, with 126 and 124 awards, respectively. No new awards went to students in life sciences. Surprisingly, 8 new fellowships were awarded to Harvard University students, including one chemist. The NSF terminated all grants to Harvard in May.

Both Filien and Tran say they worried their applications had run afoul of the NSF’s screening of grant applications for mentions of diversity—such mentions were encouraged by the agency when students submitted their application packages last fall but are now discouraged—and were relieved that didn’t seem to be the case. “I didn't want to change my morals and my value system just to get funded,” Filien says.

Michael England, a spokesperson for the NSF, confirms in an email that the new awardees came from the honorable mention list and that the agency is committed to paying education and living costs for new and existing fellows. He declines to offer any additional information.

It remains to be seen how the GRFP will look in the future, given the proposed reduction in the NSF’s 2026 budget. But the new fellows are simply grateful for the surprise turn of events.

“Getting the full award even amidst all the funding cuts makes me feel very validated as a scientist and that my science still matters, that science in general still matters,” Filien says.

With additional reporting by Leigh Krietsch Boerner and Krystal Vasquez