The National Science Foundation (NSF) has honored six Denison students and recent graduates with highly prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship Program awards. The competition received close to 17,000 applications and made 2,000 award offers. Denison 2016 awardees include current students Taylor Kessler Faulkner ’16 for artificial intelligence/robotics; Sarah Winnicki ’16 for life sciences – ecology; and recent graduates Ariana Gray Bé ’15 for environmental chemical systems at Northwestern University; Kristina Dungan Meier ’15 for atomic, molecular and optical physics at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Riley Sechrist ’15 for physics and astronomy - physics of living systems at University of Michigan Ann Arbor; and Annelise Thompson ’13 for electrochemistry at California Institute of Technology. In addition, three Denison graduates received honorable mentions f or their proposals: Jane Frandsen ’14, life sciences – biochemistry at The Ohio State University; Justine Hoch ’12, psychology – developmental at New York University; and Sam Wolock ’12, life sciences - systems and molecular biology at Harvard University.
Meier also has been offered a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship, sponsored and funded by the Department of Defense. NDSEG selections are made by the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Office of Naval Research, and the Army Research Office. The American Society for Engineering Education administers the NDSEG Fellowship. Meier is one of only about 200 individuals who were granted a three-year graduate fellowship.
“We are incredibly proud of our students and alumni,” commented Denison University President Adam Weinberg. “The recognition by NSF of our students and recent alumni is a testament to the kinds of students Denison attracts and the quality of the faculty mentorship, classroom instruction and lab experiences our students receive.”
Since 1951, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program has helped ensure the vitality of the human resource base of science and engineering in the United States and reinforces its diversity. The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions.
“NSF Graduate Research fellows often become life-long leaders that contribute significantly to both scientific innovation and teaching. Past fellows include numerous Nobel Prize winners, U.S. Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, Google founder, Sergey Brin and Freakonomics co-author, Steven Levitt,” said Joseph Reczek, associate professor of chemistry at Denison. “Our Denisonians are in good company and I’m sure they will add to the luster of the program.”
Sciences are an integral component of Denison’s liberal arts education, which requires students to experience a breadth of academic disciplines across the natural and social sciences, humanities, arts and interdisciplinary programs. At Denison, fields of scientific inquiry for bachelor’s of arts and bachelor’s of science degrees include astronomy, biochemistry, biology, chemistry, computer science, geoscience, mathematics, physics and psychology. A new interdisciplinary major, data analytics, combines a solid core of mathematics and computer science courses, electives from the social and natural sciences and four new courses in data analytics.