Nine BE Students Receive NSF Research Fellowships

Nine students in the Department of Bioengineering (BE) have received fellowships from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

Six of the students, Zakary Beach, Nicolette Driscoll, Lindsey Fernandez, Jessica Hsu, Jinsu Kim and Ryan Leaphart, are current doctoral students in Bioengineering who earned undergraduate degrees from other top BE programs. Three of the awardees, Lucy Chai, Jake Hsu and Karren Yang, are BE graduating seniors in the Class of 2017. Lucy will spend next year on a Churchill fellowship at Cambridge before starting her NSF fellowship, while Jake has an internship with Genentech’s Manufacturing Sciences and Technology department, and Karren will attend MIT.

“We are extremely fortunate to attract the very best graduate students in the country,” says David F. Meaney, Solomon R. Pollack Professor and Chair of BE. “This is an external recognition of the high quality of our students across the board.”

The Graduate Research Fellowship Program of the National Science Foundation 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. For the 2017 competition, the NSF received over 13,000 applications.